
Glass y\5?5 



Book. 



Ji 



Hon* for tlj£ 

Sermon - Studies 

by 

Jenkin Lloyd Jones, LL,. D. 

for the 

2Remf armtmtt nf JFaith 



Suf fhis s sure:— The future shall not be to the 
nation or race of most material power; 

But the future shall finally be to the nation or 
race of most potential spiritual power. 

— Lincoln Colcord 



* 



Unity Publishing Company 

CHICAGO 

1916 



•T7 



VftANSFKHRW 
PHOM CARD SECTOW, 



To 

All those who believe that the Golden 
Rule is workable between Nations as 
between individuals and that Good Will 
among men will bring Peace on Earth. 



. 



npHANKS are due to Mrs. Annie Laurie Kelly and Miss 
A May Johnson, who first caught these extemporaneous 
addresses with their stenographic pencils ; to Miss Evelyn 
H. Walker, who carefully helped them through the press ; 
to Percy Mackaye, Helen Gray Cone, Thomas Augustine 
Daly, Sara Teasdale, Robert Haven Schaufrler, and their 
publishers, whose names appear in credit at end of the 
poems, for the privilege of using copyrighted poems; to 
Unity, in whose pages these addresses first appeared, and 
the many friends, too numerous to mention, who said, 
"Do it!" 

J. LI. J. 
Tower Hill, Wis., August 9, 1916 



INTRODUCTION 



I DO not know when I have read a more interesting collec- 
tion of chapters than these in Dr. Jones' book, "Love for 
the Battle-torn Peoples." They are true, and truth is 
always interesting. Half-truths are dull, and most writing 
is only half-truths. It is only the prophet who speaks the whole 
truth, and Dr. Jones is one of the prophets. No outworn shib- 
boleths for him; no reposing in medieval formulas of thought; 
no clinging to customs simply because they are ancient; no 
allegiance to a thought because the mob holds it; no meeting 
of twentieth century problems with outgrown weapons. There 
is nothing of these things here. There is only thought that 
transcends conventions; love that spreads far beyond national 
boundaries; vision that appreciates the great human-divine 
soul of man in every land; patriotism that claims the foreigner 
as a brother to be loved rather than the enemy to be killed. 
Dr. Jones finds something to be loved in the people of 
every land. He is perfectly right in his judgment. The people 
of Europe had nothing to do with bringing on this war. The 
Germans did not hate Englishmen and Frenchmen. It was a 
handful of so-called statesmen who did it all, and it is only 
a few statesmen, editors and generals who hate other nations 
and egg their peoples into war. The path to peace lies through 
the hearts and minds of the people. These men who are now 
killing one another in the trenches, put them all together, dress 
them as civilians, get the officials out of the way and they 
would have as happy a time as children at a Sunday School 
picnic. Peoples are already much the same, and brothers; 
governments emphasize differences, fan false patriotism, shout 
national ambitions, and are enemies of one another. 

I do not recall any other book which brings out so strik- 
ingly the finest characteristics of each nation as does this. 
Here we see the real German, the real Russian, the real French- 
man, and so on, and they are all lovable and have high quali- 
ties. Would that such a book as this could be put into the 
hands of our school children. It would not only make for their 
good-will toward the peoples of other lands but would vastly 
increase their appreciation of the neighbor who lives next door. 



Frederick Lynch, £>. D. 



New York City, 
August 1, 1916. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

" A Prayer of the Peoples. " — Percy Mackaye 11 

I. The Lamb and the Lion 13 

"A Chant of Love for England." — Helen Gray Cone 29 

II. Why Love England 31 

" The Real Germany. " — Percy Mackaye 45 

III. Why Love Germany 47 

From "Aurora Leigh." — Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
ing 63 

IV. Why Love France 65 

Tribute to Italy. — Bobert Browning 79 

"Da Boy From Rome." — Thomas Augustine Daly. . 80 

V. Why Love Italy 81 

"America to Russia." — Oliver Wendell Holmes 99 

VI. Why Love Russia 101 

"West and East."— T. Bama Krishna 119 

VII. Why Love Turkey 121 

" Testament."— Sara Teasdale 135 

VIII. "Above All Nations Is Humanity" 137 

"The Scum o' the Earth." — Bobert Haven Schauffler 145 

IX. America 's Opportunity 149 



10 



A PRAYER OF THE PEOPLES 

God of us who kill our kind! 
Master of this blood-tracked Mind 
Which from the Wolf and Caliban 
Staggers towards the star of Man — 
Now, on Thy cathedral stair, 
God, we cry to Thee in prayer! 

Where our stifled anguish bleeds 
Strangling through Thine organ reeds, 
Where our voiceless songs suspire 
From the corpses in Thy choir- 
Through Thy charred and shattered nave, 
God, we cry on Thee to save! 

Save us from our tribal gods! 

From the racial powers, whose rods — 

Wreathed with stinging serpents — stir 

Odin and old Jupiter 

From their ancient hells of hate 

To invade Thy dawning state. 

Save us from their curse of kings! 
Free our souls imaginings 
From the feudal dreams of war; 
Yea, God, let us nevermore 
Make, with slaves' idolatry, 
Kaiser, king or czar of Thee! 

We who, craven in our prayer, 
Would lay off on Thee our care- 
Lay instead on us Thy load; 
On our minds Thy spirit's goad, 
On our laggard wills Thy whips 
And Thy passion on our lips! 

Fill us with the reasoned faith 
That the prophet lies, who saith 
All this web of destiny, 
Torn and tangled, cannot be 
Newly wove and redesigned 
By the Godward human mind. 

11 






Teach as, so, no more to call 
Guidance supernatural 
To our help, but heart and 'will — 
Know ourselves responsible 
For our world of wasted good 
And our blinded brotherhood. 

Lord, our God! to whom, from clay, 
Blood and mire, Thy peoples pray- 
Not from Thy cathedral's stair 
Thou hearest :— Thou criest through our prayer 
For our prayer is but the gate: 
We, who pray, ourselves are fate. 

Percy Mack aye 

From "The Present Hour." The Macmillan Company. 



12 



The Lamb and the Lion 

Without allowing ourselves to become entangled in 
the technical interpretation of the vastly complicated 
and mystical Book of Revelation, which has been the 
hunting-ground of the fanatic, the home of the dog- 
matist, the charm of the poet through all the centuries 
of Christianity, we will let the Lion stand as the 
symbol of force and the Lamb as the symbol of love. 
Let the Lion represent the power that has ever gath- 
ered around the wielders of the sword, the devotees 
of war. Let the Lamb stand for the power of kind- 
ness, reason and love. 

The method of the Lion throughout history has 
been progress through opposition and hate; the 
methods of the Lamb throughout history have been 
those of gentleness, persuasiveness and patience. 

I admit at the outset that at short range the Lion 
seems to occupy the foreground. In the short meter 
of history the destiny of individuals and of nations 
seems to be in the hands of those who wield the sword. 
The Lamb seems helpless in the presence of the Lion. 
The sneer and the sarcasm of the philosopher of force 
are justified; the Lamb finds his peace inside of the 
Lion after it is too late to cry. He has already been 
victimized. And still, after making these concessions 
and refusing to enter into the arena of the disputant, 
I claim that whenever history is measured by the long 
lines of the centuries,, Fate, Providence, — call it what 
you will, — ordains that the Lamb and not the Lion 

13 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

shall prevail. Time justifies the lover. Time rebukes 
the hater. Time vindicates gentleness and obliterates 
violence. The man with the sword occupies the front 
of the stage, but the man of thought, of wit, of love, 
dimly seen in the background, holds the permanent 
place. 

I wish to say a word of introduction to this series 
of studies of the lovable things in history, to the end 
that we may ever love the great aggregations of 
human nature which take upon themselves national 
characteristics and efficiencies. 

In the first place, biology goes to show that the 
Lamb, and not the Lion, is the end and aim of life on 
the globe. It is away down on the lower limbs of the 
biological tree that we come upon the terrible armored 
reptiles with their plated protection, horrible claws, 
fangs, tusks and horns, but with small brains and 
poorly developed nervous systems and hearts that are 
spread all along their anatomy. These animals are 
mostly extinct; their remains are preserved only in 
the pre-Adamic strata of geology. The armored rep- 
tiles, whose protection was brawn and not brain, are 
gone or going. Of the armored animals there now 
remain only the poor, sluggish, helpless crocodile, the 
alligator, the rhinoceros, and some other nearly ex- 
tinct species crawling in the burning sands of tropic 
wastes. The wolf is being eliminated or transformed 
into the loving and loyal dog. The leopard is vanish- 
ing, being preserved only as the pet of children in the 
disarmed cat. 

Botany points the same way. The spined cactus, 
the formidable sand-burr, the aggressive thistle and 
the inadequate prickly ash are only the pioneers ; the 

14 



THE LAMB AND THE LION 



brier and the brush of the jungle prepare the way for 
the green grass and the gracious trees. Nature is on 
the way to the plum and the apple-tree, and when 
man, with brains, comes in, her progress becomes 
phenomenally rapid. 

The same principle is borne out and justified in the 
individual experience of human life. Now we know 
that the unarmed man is the safer man. The armed 
man carries about with him added danger. The pistol 
in the hip pocket is a menace to the individual. Sta- 
tistics show that it generally goes off at the wrong 
place and the wrong time and hits the wrong man; 
and, what is worse, it starts the other pistol, which 
also goes off at the wrong place and the wrong time 
and hits the wrong man. 

The truest husband, the kindest father, the noblest 
citizen, by universal consent, is he who is armored 
with kindness, whose weapons are those of gentleness, 
whose protections are the protections of grace. 

The same is true of nations. The old militant pow- 
ers strode through the centuries only to write with 
their own hands their eternal doom. They bargained 
for everlasting forgetfulness. The martial spirits of 
the ages, to continue my figure, have occupied the 
front of the stage, but in the long perspective of his- 
tory they occupy unmarked graves, buried deep under 
the sand heaps of the Oriental world. 

And what is true of nations is true of religions. 
The religions of hate, of selfishness, of favoritism, 
have for a time held in leash untold millions; but 
Moloch, and Thor, and Mars, and all the other selfish 

15 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

gods that call forth the hate and prejudices of their 
devotees, are doomed. 

One of Max Miillers's unique contributions to the 
study of religion is that noble essay in which he shows 
that only the missionary religions survive and 
that the world is destined to come under the sway 
of the few great religions that have acquired a pas- 
sion for humanity, that have learned the inspirations 
of service. History, not the fanaticism of the paci- 
fists, establishes the fact that it was the gentle Buddha 
who not only made Asia mild but saved Asia from 
herself. And he who triumphed on Calvary with the 
supreme testimony of Love, — "Father, forgive them 
for they know not what they do," — is a conquering 
power in the world today. His message of love and 
tenderness, his patience with the weak, opened up 
Europe to civilization, and, slowly but surely, is con- 
quering the exhausted and waste lands in Asia and 
Africa. 

We have come to the time when this argument is 
almost admitted, as far as individuals are concerned. 
Among individuals we profess, if we do not practice, 
the principle that love is stronger than hate, that wit 
outweighs brawn, that reason and not violence is the 
final arbitrator of all quarrels. 

But when we come to the problem of nations, with 
the intruding superstitions of commercialism, patriot- 
ism and misdirected journalism confusing our judg- 
ment, we find Archbishops marching in militant uni- 
forms and those who profess to be messengers and 
advocates of the Prince of Peace praying to the God 
of love on Sunday and making ammunition in the 
basement rooms of their houses the rest of the week. 

16 



THE LAMB AND THE LION 



We are told that the doctrine of love and peace is all 
very well for the individual, and that in some far-off 
Utopian day it will do for nations, but that now we 
must not jeopardize the gospel of the Lamb by neg- 
lecting the potency of the Lion. This clamor for 
more armament, for greater "national defense," 
represents an unmeasured and unmitigated coward- 
ice. Great is the cowardice of the commercial world. 
Business is timid. The logic of barbarism still largely 
dominates the realm of trade. This distrust of love 
and peace is weakening the aspirations of many so- 
called educated men, advocates of civilization. They 
turn aside from the plea of the Lamb as expressed in 
the cry of the suffering and in the promises of the 
prophets, and spend their vacations in training them- 
selves in the art of destruction. Under the debili- 
tating discipline of the camp, science reaches its max- 
imum in its death-dealing efficiencies and deadly 
ingenuities while the grip of the soul on spiritual 
realities is slackened. 

We glorify martyrs. We celebrate and perpetuate 
the story of individuals who for righteousness' sake 
have faced death, who have chanted their own re- 
quiem on their way to the gibbet and the pyre, who 
have sung amid flames and died crowned with the 
aureole of the triumphant spirit. 

May there not be need of a martyr nation? May 
there not be a place for a patriotism so fine that 
a nation will say, "Let us die for the truth repre- 
sented by the Lamb rather than live on the levels of 
the. Lion f" 

I will not be stampeded from my faith in the po- 
tency and adequacy of love by any scare-stories of 

17 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

obliterated nations or of countries devastated by the 
hard hands of imperial powers. Let us, if grace is 
granted us, die as a nation on the high ground of 
peace rather than contribute to the length of our life 
by the methods of violence and the logic of expedi- 
ency. The world has always needed individual wit- 
nesses to truth at their own cost. What the world 
now needs vastly more is national witnesses to truth 
at their own cost. It is for our nation, segregated 
by the wide oceans, relieved from the baleful manipu- 
lations of crowns and swords, in large measure freed 
from the awful handicaps of aristocracy, class, and 
boasted "nobility' ' of birth, — the latest born of all 
great nations, for which all modern nations have been 
creamed to make its democracy possible, — to heed 
the call of the Lamb, though, if need be, it leads to 
our death. 

Oh, I know the sneer about the " sissy-man, ' ' the 
"mollycoddle," the "old women in trousers," the 
"peace-at-any-price men." I accept the sneer, and 
am not intimidated by the ridicule. "Peace at any 
price V 9 Yes! Virtue at any price! Honesty at any 
price ! Truth at any price ! Now, as in the past, for 
nations as for individuals, there is no death to virtue. 
The virtues survive by a law of the universe. 

See William Penn crossing the seas, leaving behind 
him all the trained habits and the skilled instruments 
of war, going to the wild man of the woods unarmed, 
scoring a triumph too little appreciated, writing a 
chapter in the progress of the race too little inter- 
preted in our schools. 

See Eoger Williams, cast out by the dogmatic Puri- 
tans, turned adrift in midwinter amid the inhos- 

18 



THE LAMB AND THE LION 



pitable snows of unsettled Massachusetts, armed only 
with love, skilled only in the instruments of mind, 
rescuing the people that cast him out, protecting 
them from the armed force of the wild men. Un- 
armed and unprotected, he goes out alone to meet 
these wild, mad men lusting for blood, ready with 
bludgeons and knives, eager for scalps. But when 
they find that it is " Brother Williams," their indig- 
nation changes to joy and their hate is converted into 
love. Such are some of the unappreciated triumphs 
in our own history. 

Emerson closes his beautiful essay on " Courage' ' 
with a ballad written by some unknown woman in 
the West, based on experiences for the truth of which 
our philosopher vouches. It tells of the triumph of 
George Nidiver, who, with an Indian boy, found him- 
self in one of the wild canyons of the Rockies pur- 
sued by two fierce grizzly bears, one of them scenting 
the boy, the other the man. Nidiver, the hunter, with 
but one bullet in his rifle, felled the boy's pursuer, 
and then, dropping his useless rifle, turned and faced 
the fierce beast of the Rockies and waited. Soon the 
courage of the grizzly lessened, he slackened his pace, 
then turned away and sneaked back to the jungle. 
Nidiver conquered that wild beast through a courage 
that we know not how to name and that we ourselves 
dare not practice. 

Call the roll of the dead nations. Find one that has 
died from gentleness, that has been killed because it 
believed too much and trusted too much in the power 
of the gospel of love. It is easy to find those that 
have been overcome by their own might, that have 
perished from too much faith in brawn and too little 

19 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

in brain. One of the subtle charms of history is that 
it shows how nations have survived their defeats and 
outlived their conquerors. 

Call the roll of the submerged nations of history. 
Let the stories of Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Fin- 
land, Ireland, Wales and Scotland be told to show 
how absolutely invincible their conquerors were in 
arms, but in the test how they accomplished their 
own defeat. But that is another story. 

Let me try to keep my theme. Browning wrote of 
the " Threatening Tyrant" who was maddened by the 
stubborn indifference of a "human mite" in his 
dominion. The "mite" could not be scared. He 
would not be intimidated. The tyrant tried to crush 
him by personal insult, by cruelty. When at the last 
he had exhausted his ingenuity in trying to suppress, 
defeat or humiliate that proud spirit, the power that 
overrules tyrants, discounts conquerors and dethrones 
kings became manifest. The "mite" stood up and 
prayed. And the tyrant saw a mighty arm thrown 
athwart the blue sky protecting his subject, and it was 
the tyrant and not the subject that was afraid. This 
poem of Browning's is vindicated in the history of 
the world. 

It is a sad reflection upon the jurisprudence of the 
nations that the one word which expresses the admin- 
istration of justice by law and order has become a 
word of disrepute. It is almost a reproach to call a 
man a ' i diplomat ' ' or to speak of l ' diplomacy. " It is 
an implication of cowardice when we say that a man 
resorts to "diplomacy." But diplomacy is the coming 
word in international affairs. More and more the 
world is being governed by the diplomat and not 

20 



THE LAMB AND THE LION 



by the soldier. Diplomacy is still in its swaddling 
clothes. The ultimate appeal is to be made not to the 
sword, but to reason and judgment. 

I found the other day an interesting sidelight on 
Lincoln brought out in one of the recent books, show- 
ing how that great prophet heart, by following the 
lead of his gentle nature, perhaps averted one 
more horrible conflict for our nation, already sadly 
entangled in civil war. Some of us are old enough 
to remember our respect for the efficiency of William 
H. Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, whose very 
appointment was a triumph of diplomacy in the 
United States. Seward was Lincoln's greatest rival. 
He accepted the cabinet position with pity, if not 
contempt, for his chief, expecting that much of the 
executive work would fall upon his shoulders through 
the incapacity of the man from Illinois. In one of 
the many delicate crises between the United States 
and England, William H. Seward wrote a bristling 
reply to an English document. It was charged with 
what some of the President's successors still call 
"Honor." Fortunately, the state document had to 
pass under the inspection of the President. The fol- 
lowing are some of the erasures, emendations and 
omissions of President Lincoln to the belligerent 
manifesto of the Secretary of State. Where Seward 
spoke of an act as "wrongful," Lincoln substituted 
the word "hurtful." Where Seward said, "No one 
of these proceedings will be borne by the United 
States," Lincoln said, "No one of these proceedings 
will pass unquestioned " Where Seward said, "When 
this act of intervention is distinctly performed, we 
from that hour shall cease to be friends and become 

21 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

once more, as we have twice been before, forced to be 
enemies of Great Britain." And the great President 
scratched this bellicose sentence out entirely. "Where 
Seward spoke of a "crime," Lincoln amended it by 
the word "error." These slight but significant 
changes, according to the judgment of the competent, 
saved the United States from a war with England, 
and, what is infinitely more and better, vindicated 
the higher method, rebuked the lower standards of 
" national honor" and "courtesy." Today we wait 
for the courage and wisdom of the diplomat that 
shall develop international courtesies, international 
appeals to justice, to reason and to love, and an inter- 
national enforcement of these rulings. 

but this terrible alarm on the part of our brave 
business men and valiant politicians lest some morn- 
ing we shall wake up and' find the Japanese swarm- 
ing on our western shore and German battleships in 
possession of New York harbor! They remind me of 
a pleasant story told of Lincoln when a lot of timid 
merchants called upon him and demanded better 
protection for New York. The tired President, after 
reflection, said, "Well, gentlemen, if I had as much 
money as you are reported to have, and if I was as 
badly scared as you seem to be, I think I would go 
back and build a few battleships on my own hook, 
which you are free to do." 

Tolstoy's great hope was that individual men, the 
citizens of his country, would become so devoted to 
the good of their country, so civilized, — should I say 
"Christianized"? — that they would refuse to lend 
themselves to any crowned heads for the destruction 

22 



THE LAMB AND THE LION 



of the innocent. This was the great triumph of the 
Pukhobors, whom Tolstoy befriended. 

Ruskin discovered that the reason for respect for 
the soldier was not that he was a man of war and 
armed for destruction, but that, back of his arms, 
there was a man who was willing, if need be, to die 
for a cause, and it was Ruskin 's high demand that 
our merchants and our bankers and our preachers 
should, like the soldier, be willing to give their lives 
for a principle. There is no more emphatic demand 
in the decalogue of Moses or in the higher decalogue 
of Nature than that which says, "Thou shalt not 
kill!" Murder is murder, under whatever guise, and 
no illusions of war will make it otherwise. There 
are two ways in which a law may be observed. When 
I am summoned to kill, I can refuse, and accept the 
penalty for disobedience. Hundreds of sheriffs in the 
United States have resigned their offices rather than 
lend themselves to the brutality of hanging a man. 
When men are sufficiently devoted to principle that 
they will consent to be shot rather than consent to 
shoot, the triumph of the Lamb will begin to be 
realized. 

Notwithstanding all the clamor and spite of the 
awful manifestations of today, the trend of history 
has been away from war to the methods of peace. 
Alfred's great triumph was that he united the seven 
quarreling tribes in Southern England into one hep- 
tarchy. United Italy is a great triumph of modern 
civilization. There is a United Germany. The 
Greater Britain is beginning to recognize that the 
bonds which bind it to its far-off dependencies are not 
the rotten chains of power, but the golden links of 

33 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

love, a common intelligence, a common language and 
a common humanity. The United States of America 
was woven out of once suspicious and belligerent 
States. The United States of Europe is well started, 
and the organized world is surely coming. 

While recently carrying the message of peace into 
Pennsylvania, I spent one bright, sunny day, with 
many other visitors, in riding over the battlefields of 
Gettysburg. The place which attracted the most at- 
tention, the only place where I wanted to dismount 
from the automobile and stand upon the ground, was 
at Spangler's Spring, now protected by noble ma- 
sonry. In the awful night after the second day's 
battle, while the great captains on both sides were 
consulting how best to carry on the deadly business 
the next day, both Union and Confederate soldiers 
dragged dying men here for a drink, the mangled 
on both sides came here to wash away the clotted 
blood. Not far away I found the clematis in full 
bloom covering the "Devil's Angle," which fifty years 
ago was drenched in human blood. 

Verheeren, the poet laureate of Belgium, in his book 
entitled "Belgium's Agony," says: 

You may say "to hate is unchristian and wrong." 
I agree with you. But must we not add that "to 
hate is necessary?" There must be hatred in battle. 
The fighter who does not hate will fight feebly and 
be beaten. 

This, too, is the testimony of Ernst Lissauer, the 
German poet who has won such unenviable renown for 
his "Chant of Hate," which, we are told, is only a 
new interpretation of an old "Chant of Hate" against 
Austria. 

24 



THE LAMB AND THE LION 



You will we hate with a lasting hate, 
We will never forego our hate, 
Hate by water and hate by land, 
Hate of the head and hate of the hand, 
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, 
Hate of seventy millions, choking down. 
We love as one, we hate as one, 
We have one foe and one alone — 
England. 

This is war at long range. 

Against this we have the testimony of that sensi- 
tive man in the trenches, Fritz Kreisler, the accom- 
plished violinist of Austria, who in four weeks passed 
from the proud recruit to the broken invalid officer. 
He says : 

It was there and then that I made a curious observation. 
After the second day we had almost grown to know each 
other. The Russians would laughingly call over to us, and 
the Austrians would answer. The salient feature of these 
three days' fighting was the extraordinary lack of hatred. 
In fact, it is astonishing how little actual hatred exists 
between fighting men. One fights fiercely and passionately, 
mass against mass, but as soon as the mass crystallizes 
itself into human individuals whose features one actually 
can recognize, hatred almost ceases. Of course, fighting 
continues, but somehow it loses its fierceness and takes more 
the form of a sport, each side being eager to get the best 
of the other. One still shoots at his opponent, but almost 
regrets when he sees him drop. 

The Lion claims the grim exterior, but the Lamb's 
plea reaches the heart even of belligerent men. 

Civilization began when the hunter became a 
herder. It advanced when the herder gave way to 
the plowroan ? the farmer, and again when the farmer 

25 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

became a gardener, a florist. According to the 
statistics of the world there are now seven hundred 
thousand ministers of the Christian religion, would- 
be interpreters of the Lamb that was sacrificed for 
the redemption of the world, whose- " blood washes 
clean " the guilty, according to the theological figure. 
We are waiting for these ministers to help not the 
" Prince," but the " peasant" of peace, to bring the 
doctrine of the Fatherhood of God down to the 
brotherhood of man, a doctrine which will ripen into 
peace. 

Much ingenuity has been expended in trying to 
find what the "seven seals" were that bound the book 
of destiny in the Revelation poem. For present pur- 
poses let us fancy that the seals stand for the seven 
great problems of our day, — the temperance ques- 
tion, labor reform, the emancipation of woman, the 
social evil, the escape from sectarianism in religion 
and from partisanship in politics, and, most serious 
of all, the question of international peace. All these 
seals are to be broken, not by violence but by love, 
not by force but by wit, and already enough has been 
accomplished by the gentle power of reason to justify 
the promise of the Revelator. 

To recapitulate: The Lamb represents the love 
forces of life, the Lion the brute forces. One leads 
by innocence, the other by prowess. In the short 
range interpretation the Lion has his way. In the 
long range of history the Lamb assumes leader- 
ship. On the lower limbs of the biological tree, the 
fiercer brutes, the armored, horned, clawed and 
fanged creatures have been waging a losing battle 
in the world. They are well-nigh extinct. The lion 

26 



THE LAMB AND THE LION 



and the tiger are at home only in the far-away jungles 
of Africa and other out-of-the-way corners of the 
world not yet ruled by the wit of unarmed life. In 
the botanical world the briers are giving way to the 
vine and the thorns are being supplanted by the fig- 
tree. 

In the history of human life the conquests of the 
battlefield are short-lived. The triumphs of the mili- 
tant are fleeting. The great " Powers" of antiquity, 
armed to the teeth, equipped for war and reeking in 
blood, are buried beneath the dust of oblivion. China, 
the pacific nation, has outlived all the "Powers" that 
were rampant in its youth, four thousand years ago. 
It is the conquered Greece, the humiliated Judea, the 
dismantled Jerusalem, that still dominate the culture 
of the world. 

Armament is a confession of weakness, a challenge 
to contest on brute lines. The unarmored man is 
invincible. For nineteen hundred years Peter has 
flourished his sword at the Gethsemane crises of his- 
tory, but he who said "Put up thy sword !" won a 
lasting triumph on Calvary. The world is witness- 
ing at the present time an unanswerable demonstra- 
tion of the impotency of the Lion, and it anxiously 
awaits one more triumph of the Lamb. The attempt 
to settle disputes, to advance the well-being of nations 
by the use of Lion weapons is once more caught in 
a frantic imbecility, almost a world-wide insanity. 
We rightly speak of Europe as "mad." Its sanity 
will return only when reason is born again out of 
love, symbolized by the unarmed but persistent 
Lamb. 

The Lamb is destined to conquer the world. It is 

27 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

to confute the man of the sword with gentleness. 
Those who would contribute to the defense of this 
nation will do well to abandon the field of Mars and 
pay reverence instead to Athena, the goddess of Wis- 
dom, for her children are Philosophy, Science, Art, 
and, above all, Religion, whose conquering word is 
justice, whose kingdom includes all humanity, and 
whose countersign, in the darkest night of war and 
hatred, is "brotherhood!" 



28 



A CHANT OF LOVE FOR ENGLAND. 

A song: of hate Is a song: of Hell; 
Some there be that sing; it well; 
Let thein sing: it loud and long:, 
We lift our hearts in a loftier song:: 
We lift our hearts to Heaven above, 
Singing: the glory of her we love,— 
ENGLAND! 

Glory of thought and glory of deed, 
Glory of Hampden and Runnymede; 
Glory of ships that sought far goals, 
Glory of swords and glory of souls! 
Glory of songs mounting: as birds, 
Glory immortal of magical words; 
Glory of 3111 ton, glory of Nelson, 
Tragical glory of Gordon and Seott; 
Glory of Shelley, glory of Sidney, 
Glory transcendent that perishes not,— 
Hers is the story, hers be the glory, 
ENGLAND! 

Shatter her beauteous breast ye may; 
The Spirit of England none can slay! 
Dash the bomb on the dome of Paul's, — 
Deem ye the fame of the Admiral falls? 
Pry the stone from the chancel floor, — 
Dream ye that Shakespeare shall live no more? 
Where is the giant shot that kills 
Wordsworth walking the old green hills? 
Trample the red rose on the ground, — 
Keats is beauty while earth spins round! 
Bind her, grind her, burn her with lire, 
Cast her ashes into the sea,— 
She shall escape, she shall aspire, 
She shall arise to make men free; 
She shall arise in sacred scorn, 
Lighting the lives that are yet unborn; 
Spirit supernal, Splendor eternal, 
ENGLAND! 

—Helen Gray Cone. 

From "A Chant of Love for England and Other Poems." 
E. P. Dutton & Co. 



29 



II. 
Why Love England 

Why do I love England? Because it contains 
Stonehenge, the great and mystic witness of a lost 
religion and a forgotten age. The papers recently 
announced the quite un-English event, the selling of 
Stonehenge for $35,000. But Stonehenge cannot be 
sold. No title deed can be issued by mortal man or 
registered in human court that will make Stonehenge 
anything other than a symbol of that rich inheritance 
of England, the poetic, marvelous tide of life that has 
poured its vigor into the veins of the modern Eng- 
lishman from pre-Christian times. Stonehenge, with 
its attendant "Druid circles," " rocking stones," 
" cromlechs" and "meinhir," and all its other relics 
of the pre-English world, hint at the rich sub-soil out 
of which England has grown. It tells of a marvelous 
people that, in the fulness of time, grew into a nation 
with noble national aspirations. 

I love England because it was the home of King 
Arthur, almost the only royalty in English history 
worthy of our reverence and growing respect. His 
existence is questioned, but King Arthur as the ideal 
of the Eound Table Knights was the fore-runner of 
English democracy. He represents the marvelous 
blend of Druidism and Christianity that furnished, 
as Leigh Hunt says, a third of chivalry. The stories 
of King Arthur and his Knights, — the quest of Sir 
Galahad and the Knights of the Round Table, — are 
of such benignant nature that they incited through- 

31 



LOVE FOB THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

out Europe a love for home traditions and an enthu- 
siasm for the national tongue that made our modern 
literature possible. These stories not only lie back 
of English lore and poetry, but on them are deeply 
founded French, German and Scandinavian tradi- 
tions. I love England because it was the home of 
Arthur and the seat of Druidic life and love. 

I love England because it was the cradle of free- 
dom. There the struggles with kings and artificial 
nobility began early. Its history contains the story 
of the Magna Chart a, the Habeas Corpus Act, of trial 
by jury, and the brave deeds connected therewith. 
England represents the defiance and leadership of 
Cromwell. It was England that went away from 
home with Pastor Robinson, who at Leyden spoke the 
prophetic word sending English men and English 
women across the seas charged with the commission 
to seek deeper into the sanctities of Holy Writ. For 
there was more to break out of the pages of their 
scriptures than had yet been discovered. New reve- 
lations were still to be expected. 

I love England for the Roger Williams it cast out 
and whom its Puritans would have naught of. but 
who went forth to Rhode Island to lay the founda- 
tions of the first historic commonwealth ever tech- 
nically and literally committed to religious freedom. 

I love England for the nobility of its non-nobles 
and its struggle to elevate the toiler, the England 
that, when its titled nobles, its masters of legislation, 
its cabinet officers, weakened in the presence of the 
calamitous financial problem which the Civil War 
in the United States visited upon them, found un- 
numbered thousands of cotton-spinners in Manches- 

32 



WHY LOVE ENGLAND 



ter and Birmingham and elsewhere who said: "We 
will starve if by starving we can make common cause 
with those who seek the freedom of any human 
brother, however dark his skin." I love England 
for the cotton-spinners who remained loyal when 
even her great premier Gladstone failed us, as he 
realized and confessed later, saying, "With incredible 
grossness I threw my sympathy on the wrong side." 

I love the England of Sir Thomas More, who, in 
his "Utopia," anticipated not only all the dream com- 
monwealths that have enriched our literature since, 
but most of the achievements of our so-called repub- 
lics, and who in that book still offers us, in our 
boasted free country, an unrealized program to 
strive after for another century. 

I love the England of John Ball, who, away back 
in medieval times led the workingmen of England 
up to London to demand their rights. I love the 
England of John Euskin, the favored child of cul- 
ture, whose brain and nerves were attuned to an art 
so delicate that even the artists of today can scarcely 
understand, much less realize it. Yet in the midst 
of all his high art studies and inspirations he turned 
aside to pour the wealth of his trained mind and sen- 
sitive heart into the incomparable "Letters to Eng- 
lish Working-Men." For eight long years these 
letters came, month by month, but he died with 
scarcely a response. Sadly he said, "None of you 
have written me." I love England for the great Car- 
lyle, who broke through sham and pretense, borrowed 
the thinking of his great colleagues on the continent, 
the great broad leaders of thought in Germany, and 

33 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

made himself prophet not only of England and of 
Germany, but of his age and the world. 

I love England for the upward striving of its labor- 
ing men, lately called to mourn the death of their 
leader, James Kier Hardie. I love England for its 
great peace-maker, Wilberforce, the father of the 
emancipators of modern times, who succeeded in 
striking the shackles from English slaves without 
firing a gun, securing an emancipation which the 
United States had to buy with half a million lives 
and four years of fratricidal war. 

I love England for George Fox, William Perm and 
John Bright, men who anticipated all our noisy peace 
societies and peace workers and struck deeper than 
most of our would-be peace agitators dare go today. 
They formulated for us in fulness the ultimate gos- 
pel of international disarmament, based not on eco- 
nomics or diplomatic considerations, but on the devel- 
opment of the human soul to the point where it will 
not consent to destroy the life it cannot restore. 
Thomas Carlyle said that the greatest event of mod- 
ern history was not the battle of Waterloo, Peterloo, 
or Austerlitz, but that which took place when the 
cobbler, George Fox, stitched for himself a perennial 
suit of leather and then, leaving the shoemaker's 
bench, went out into the world to preach the emanci- 
pation of the soul from outward form or loyalty to 
external scripture and pledged unqualified loyalty to 
the inner spirit. Our own historians skip lightly over 
the greatest triumph in American history, the greatest 
political innovation in the history of governments. 
This was achieved by William Penn, the Quaker, who 
met the dreaded representatives of what we call 

34 



WHY LOVE ENGLAND 



"savage" people without sword or gun and entered 
into a pact of peace that lasted to the end, making 
Pennsylvania the one realm which the red man turned 
over into the custody of his successor, the white man, 
without violence or bitterness. I love England be- 
cause it gave to the world George Fox, William Penn 
and John Bright, whose vision to the end was un- 
clouded by national conceits, unrimmed by island 
boundaries. 

I love England again for her great philanthropists, 
of whom I need name but two. These two did more 
to revolutionize the thought of governments and the 
functions of public officers on philanthropic lines 
than any other two of their time. John Howard 
transformed the prison-pens of Europe, where unfor- 
tunate men and defective women were chained to 
rings in their cells like cattle in a stall. He saw the 
potency of tenderness, the wisdom of kindliness. He 
has been in his grave many a year, but his work is still 
going on. Florence Nightingale, the sensitive, tender 
child, not only of culture but of luxury, dared to go 
to the gruesome and wicked battlefields of the Crimea, 
where trained physicians with blanched faces hesi- 
tated, thereby not only saving lives but laying the 
foundations of the most daring and benignant institu- 
tions of modern times. Whatever the trained nurse is 
now, whatever she has accomplished and is doing, is 
traceable directly to this little sensitive daughter of 
England, I love England because it was the home of 
John Howard and Florence Nightingale. And they 
were not unique or exceptional, but typical children 
of England. 

Then I love England for her great heretics, for her 

35 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

thinkers and her philosophers. I love her for Francis 
and Eoger Bacon, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, 
Huxley and Tyndall. I love her because she sent her 
bold son, Thomas Paine, over the water to enlarge 
the courage of England and the world with his 
matchless contributions of "The Crisis," "Common- 
sense," "The Eights of Man" and "The Age of 
Reason." 

I love England for her martyrs, — Cranmer, who 
offered to the flames his right hand that it might first 
expiate the cowardice which it once exhibited in 
signing a retraction, and Latimer, who said to Ridley, 
on their way to the fire that burned them in the 
Oxford ditch, "Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, for 
we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, 
in England as I trust shall never be put out. " I love 
England for the successors of these brave martyrs, the 
Unitarian heroes who were bereft of their rights and 
risked their lives for conscience's sake. Joseph Priest- 
ley, scientist that he was, stood in the pulpit and 
declared a gospel big enough to include his laboratories 
and recognize as texts in the Bible of the Eternal the 
discoveries of lenses and solvents. When the lower 
England, the passing England, burned his library and 
home, he escaped to America to the wild woods of 
Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, and there laid 
the foundation of a religious organization that was big 
enough and bold enough to keep abreast of science. 
The first Unitarian society in America was organized 
by this great Englishman whom I love. I like to 
think of the splendid succession, — Joseph Priestley, 
Bishop Colenso, Dean Stanley, Charles Kingsley and 
the Arnolds, father and son, all of them enemies of 

36 



WHY LOVE ENGLAND 



dogmatism, prophets of the open faith, advocates of 
the gospel of love. 

I love England for its great art treasures, its 
mighty cathedrals, glorious even in their ruin, — York 
and Salisbury, Westminster and Canterbury, Tin- 
tern, Furness, and the greatest and sweetest of them 
all, Glastonbury, with its magic thorn-bush, planted, 
tradition has it, by Joseph of Arimathaea, which 
blooms out of season at Christmas time. We may not 
find the blossom of the Glastonbury thorn at Christ- 
mas as related by the fable, but Glastonbury Cathe- 
dral contains, according to the fable, the remains of 
the great Arthur, upon whose tomb was engraved in 
stately Latin, or as the bards say in classic Welch, 
"Here lies Arthur, King that was and King that is to 
be." The King that was may be a matter of doubt, 
but the King that is to be, the Arthur of democracy 
and beauty, the Arthur of Glastonbury fame and 
fable, is surely coming to his coronation. I love 
England for this great promise. 

If I knew more I could confess more intelligently 
the grounds of my love for England in her great 
artists of more modern date, — Turner, Watts, Burne- 
Jones, Sir Frederick Leighton, Millais, Sir Joshua 
Eeynolds, and the rest of them, — but that is a story 
beyond my reach, though not beyond my cataloging. 

I love England for the vast reaches it represents, 
from Darwin in his consecrated laboratories to Sir 
John Franklin lost in Arctic snows, and to that most 
heroic figure of our day, Captain Scott, writing, 
writing, writing, in his Antarctic frost-home, with 
fingers growing helpless from freezing, those records 

37 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

that have been saved though the man was lost. Oh, I 
love that England. 

I love England for its prophetic voices that have 
sung their faith in deathless measures. I love the 
little island because it was the home of the big 
Shakespeare and his high retinue, Milton, Shelley, 
Wordsworth, the Brownings, and Tennyson, and, 
parallel with these, her great novelists, Dickens and 
Thackeray, Kingsley, George Eliot, and, to name him 
out of time, the greatest of them all, perhaps, John 
Bunyan. These names represent the English of the 
England I love. None of them was misplaced. They 
came in the order of time and were the logical chil- 
dren of destiny. 

Robert Browning said, "My father turned his back 
on a fortune because he could not endure slavery in 
the West Indies and accepted instead a humble clerk- 
ship in a London bank which he occupied to the end 
of his life." I love the England which gave birth to 
such a man. 

It ought not to be a surprise in these days of patri- 
ot ism to re-discover the words of Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning, in which she foretells the coming of an 
English statesman who will stand up and assert of 
some suggested policy: 

"This is good for your trade; this is necessary for your 
domination ; but it will vex a people hard up ; it will hurt a 
people farther off; it will profit nothing to the general hu- 
manity; therefore away with it! It is not for you or for 
me." When a British Minister dares speak so, and when a 
British public applauds him speaking, then shall the nation 
he glorious, and her praise, instead of exploding from 
within, from loud civic mouths, come to her from without, 

38 



WHY LOVE ENGLAND 



as all worthy praise must — from the alliances she has fos- 
tered, and the peoples she has saved. 

I love the England that produced such a prophet 
soul, such a woman seer. 

But still more I love the English people that rep- 
resent the non-English England. No " island" is the 
home of Shakespeare. And although England dared 
call Milton back from his search for culture on his 
way to Athens, the home of his heart and brain, that 
he might become the foreign secretary of Cromwell, 
who was fighting for democracy, Milton is no island 
Englishman. He belongs to the non-English England 
that grew out of English soil. 

There is a militant Anglo-India. I will not stop to 
speak of its iniquities. In the dark background stand 
Warren Hastings and Lord Clive, but the foreground 
is illumined by the great triumph of Sir William 
Jones, the scholar who was sent out there for the 
purpose of defending the right of English merchants 
against supposed heathen aggressiveness. His soul 
was big enough to discover, away out there in the 
borderland of humanity, away off there in Asia, the 
home of all the religions, a distinct, powerful liter- 
ature and a profound philosophy. He bent the ener- 
gies of his genius to bring to cultured Europe the 
astonishing surprise that over there was the mother 
of Greece and Rome, the grandmother of all our west- 
ern languages. Now all scholars who know enough 
to know it, unite in praising the Sanskrit language. 
I love that non-English England that is represented 
by the republic of letters, by the triumph of science, 
by its world-encircling literature, by its world-inclu- 
sive humanity. 

39 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

The England that I love is, at its noblest, ashamed 
of the passing boast that "Britannia rules the waves." 
It is rising into the higher patriotism that will sing, 
" Britannia rules the minds of the world!" It will 
set going the waves of love, the boundaries of which 
are the eternal boundaries of life, enclosing the love 
precincts of the All-Father-land. 

I love England because I hate crowns — hate them 
with an eternal hatred, God helping me. I love the 
England that is slowly but surely retiring the landed 
baron and promoting the toiler, the man of the Eng- 
lish cottage who keeps the wayside hedges trimmed 
and makes the by-ways of England radiant as a park 
and fragrant as a flower bed. I love the England 
that is superior to all its kings and queens. The less 
said about some of these the better. The noblest 
pages in the history of English royalty are those 
written about borrowed royalty, — William the Silent 
and Albert, Prince Consort. They are men to love, 
these are names to conjure by. The benignant, good- 
natured Victoria made her greatest contribution to 
English life when she imported and married Prince 
Albert. 

I love England for the complexity of its blood, 
because, through ways that are dark and sometimes 
tricks that are vain, it has succeeded in blending one 
of the greatest race complexities to be found on the 
globe. Angles and Saxons, Jutes and Danes, the Nor- 
man and their later complications of Welsh, Irish, 
Scotch, Manx and Cornish; all of these various peo- 
ples have been poured into that caldron of destiny 
which we call England. Here they were stirred 
and stirred, not by the witches' ladle, but by the 

40 



WHY LOVE ENGLAND 



divine wand that makes history progressive and keeps 
the human race still advancing, however it may be 
with individuals. 

But more than all, I love England, not for its 
" glens and streams," though they have been immor- 
talized in melodious verse, not for its " rocks and 
rills," which are celebrated in the patriotic songs of 
all countries, but for that conquering compound, the 
English language. This is the best measure of the 
England I love. Its spelling is frightful, its pronun- 
ciation is impossible, its articulation and emphasis 
are grating and harsh to the ear trained to more mu- 
sical languages, but it is the inoculated soil of social 
schemes and dreams. The farmers are told that they 
can raise alfalfa in Wisconsin if they can only get the 
soil properly inoculated. They must transplant germs 
favorable to this desirable plant. The English lan- 
guage is planted rich with the germs of freedom, the 
microbes of fellowship, the bacteria of progress, and 
he who learns to read the language of Shakespeare 
and knows that "well of English undefiled" of the 
King James version of the Bible, is already on the 
way to free thought, broad views, splendid dreams. 

In the sixth century, when Gregory, a young man 
touched with an ardent missionary passion, noticed 
in the market place of Rome some recently brought 
captives, — so the well-known story goes, — he was 
struck by the graciousness of the youths, their bright 
eyes and radiant faces. And he said to the slave 
keeper, "Who are these?" "They are prisoners of 
war." "Of what people are they?" "They belong 
to the Angles." "Right you are," said the mission- 
ary, "Such faces and forms should become angels. 

41 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

From what country have they come?" "From 
Deira." "Right again," said the missionary, picking 
a Latin meaning out of the Saxon word. "They 
should be saved from the wrath of God. Whose sub- 
jects are they?" "Subjects of King Aleia," said the 
slave keeper. "Surely I must find them and give to 
them the gospel, that they may sing Alleluiah." This 
story of Gregory indicates the promise and potency 
of the England I love, which still offers material out 
of which to make angels. It still needs the message 
that will remove it from the day of wrath, and teach 
it to sing the Alleluiah of a brotherhood too large 
for English boundaries, but bargained for by the 
English inheritance in which I rejoice, of which I 
am part. 

Oh, yes, "there is another side," but Fate has 
doomed the other records to oblivion and I will not 
interfere by putting off the forgetfulness one second 
by trying to recall them. Let the cruel wars, the 
degradation of kings, the tyranny of barons, the 
accursed conceit of battleships and guns find the for- 
getfulness which belongs to them while I sing of the 
England I love, in the lines of Helen Gray Cone : 

Shatter her beauteous breast ye may; 
The spirit of England none can slay! 
• * * 

Pry the stone from the chancel floor, — 
Dream ye that Shakespeare shall live no more? 
Where is the giant shot that kills 
Wordsworth walking the old green hills? 
Trample the red rose on the ground, — 
Keats is beauty while earth spins round ! 
Bind her, grind her, burn her with fire, 

42 



WHY LOVE ENGLAND 



Cast her ashes into the sea, — 
She shall escape, she shall aspire, 
She shall arise to make men free; 
She shall arise in sacred scorn, 
Lighting the lives that are yet unborn; 
Spirit supernal, Splendor eternal, 
ENGLAND! 



43 



THE REAL, GERMANY 

Bismarck— or rapt Beethoven with his dreams: 

Ah, 'which -was blind? Or which bespoke his race? — 

That breed which nurtured Heine's haunting; grace, 

And Goethe, mastering; Olympic themes 

Of meditation, Mozart's golden gleams, 

And Leibnitz charting; realms of time and space, 

Great-hearted Schiller, and that fairy brace 

Of brothers who first trailed the goblin streams. 

Bismarck for these builded an Iron tomb, 

And clanged the door, and turned a kaiser's key; 

And simple folk, that once danced merrily 

Their May-ring rites, march now in roaring gloom 

Toward that renascent dawn when the black womb 

Of buried guns gives birth to Germany. 

—Percy Mackaye 

From "The Present Hour.** The Macmillan Company. 



45 



III. 



Why Love Germany 

Why do I love Germany ? Because it has given to 
the world three great conquering names in modern 
civilization; names which will ever hold high sway 
over hearts that love their kind and minds that seek 
the truth, — Luther, Kant and Goethe, — each one of 
them a compelling name. 

Martin Luther "belongs," as Doctor Hedge once 
wrote, "to the world." He gave a national intellectual 
life to Germany. "He was the voice of the nation." 

Three or four pictures will suffice for an introduc- 
tion to this greatest of modern emancipators of the 
human mind, who dedicated the soul to its own sanc- 
tities. 

He was the son of a peasant, who won his way 
through school by singing on the streets. Luther was 
early touched into thoughtfulness and into seeking the 
consolations and inspirations of religion, but he grew 
sick with the formalities and superstitions which pre- 
vailed in the religious life about him. The kindly 
Father-Superior of the order which he had joined 
thought he needed a change and sent him to Rome. 
Thither he went gladly, hoping that the sight of the 
sacred city would cure him of his heart-sickness. When 
the "Eternal City" broke upon his eyes, he fell upon 
his knees, crying, "Hail, Holy Rome! Hail, Rome!" 
But he finds the life of Rome and all its traditions 
smitten with insincerity. He undertakes to ascend the 
Scala Sancta, the holy stairs, for, as the faithful be- 

47 



LOVE FOB, THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

lieve, if you ascend on naked knees, uttering a sincere 
prayer with each step, some entrancing vision will be 
vouchsafed you before you reach the top, a glimpse, 
perchance, of the Celestial City, perhaps the face of 
the sacred Virgin, possibly that of the Redeemer of the 
world. But his mind is working as he toils upward, 
and a shaft of thought strikes him as thrilling as the 
bolt of lightning which had struck his young com- 
panion in the meadow years before and turned his 
mind to serious things. A word from Paul breaks 
upon his soul, — "By faith are ye justified,' ' — and 
he rises from his knees and walks down, leaving the 
holy ascent forever uncompleted. 

Then he went back to nail his ninety challenges, 
each challenge involving a principle, on the chapel 
door at Wurtemburg. The answer was prompt. He 
was summoned into the presence of ' ■ the most remark- 
able assembly ever convened on earth," as the histo- 
rian says, — an emperor in the chair, a jury of three 
hundred cardinals, and numerous attendant noble- 
men. It was "an empire against a man." Friends, 
knowing the intensity of the feeling against him and 
fearing he would never return alive, pleaded with 
him not to obey the summons. The reply was, " I go 
to Worms though there were as many devils in the 
streets as there are tiles on the house-tops. ' ' When he 
reached there he found the houses not covered with 
devils, but with curious human beings, stirred to pro- 
found excitement. Five thousand people thronged 
the streets. 

On the first day the august assemblage overawed 
him. Weary, hungry and lonely, his voice failed, he 
could hardly be heard, and friends said sorrowfully, 

48 



WHY LOVE GERMANY 



"His case is lost." He asked for a night's delay to 
prepare Lis case. A good sleep and a hearty meal re- 
stored his spirit, and he stood up in that presence 
next morning to make his defense. He began to read 
in stately Latin from a well prepared manuscript. 
But the rush of thought carried him into the German 
vernacular, and he broke out with the memorable de- 
fiance which rings through the generations to give 
courage to every heart where great issues are press- 
ing: 

u Here Stand I, I Cannot Otherwise, God Helping Me." 

The obscure son of a peasant overawed the Cardi- 
nals, the Knights, and the Emperor. He was vouch- 
safed protection by the authorities. He was hurried 
away. Friends fled with him to the country. Other 
friends in disguise, knowing the critical situation and 
fearing for his life, held up the cavalcade, tore him 
from his escort and carried him off to the obscure 
castle of Wartburg, where he remained a lonely pris- 
oner for ten months. Here he "fought with devils/' 
but during this time he "re-created the language in 
which he was cradled. ' ' He lifted the vernacular dia- 
lect into a literary language and gave to Germany a 
priceless gift, — the most valuable contribution ever 
given to any nation by any man, — a language fit to 
carry literature. He gave them his German version 
of the Bible. 

Luther was an old man at sixty. He died at sixty- 
three, broken by the strain of constant struggle with 
enemies, but through it all he bore a cheerful spirit. 
Ever the stalwart champion of intellectual liberty, of 
the inner voice, he was also the smiling father, the 
playful husband, the lover of music. When his oppo- 

49 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

nents undertook to meet him in debate they com- 
plained that their arguments were drowned in song. 
He went away from home on a peace errand to quiet 
warring kindred. On this journey he died, bravely, 
as he had lived. Such was Luther. 

Nearly two hundred years later, — from 1724 to 
1804, — came the eighty years that measured the earth- 
ly life of Immanuel Kant. If we seek to rank him 
among his colleagues, we can find but three or four 
names to enter in the list: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, 
Bacon, — perhaps there are no more. He did for phi- 
losophy what Darwin did for biology, — summoned the 
human mind to respect law and to recognize the laws 
of thought, the inner potency of the soul. 

Kant was a little shadowy man, only five feet high, 
a poor little skeleton, who survived his birth only 
through the exceeding care of an exceptional mother. 
He never went more than sixty -five miles from the 
place in which he was born, a city, sad irony of his- 
tory, which in these last months has been disturbed 
by the roar of cannon, besieged by the forces of war, 
— Konigsberg. He gave a new impulse to thought. 
He compelled a change of front in the thinking of the 
world. 

I cannot speak of his high philosophy. Let us think 
of him in two connections only at this time, both ade- 
quate reasons why we should love Germany, and while 
reason and breath remain to me I will declare my 
love. 

One day in the streets of Konigsberg this little, un- 
successful, despised man, who could not be trusted 
with a professorship but earned a meager living as a 
tutor, surprised an Englishman by defending the 

50 



WHY LOVE GERMANY 



American Revolution and deploring the unjustifiable 
attitude of England. The Englishman took up the 
challenge, demanding satisfaction. Said the little 
man, "Do you understand the situation? Will you 
come to my room?" And there he unfolded the phi- 
losophy of democracy in such a way that the man 
from England said, "I never thought of it in that 
light, ' ' and there was laid the foundation of a remark- 
able friendship that continued to the end of life. 

Again, in 1795,, five years before the beginning of 
the nineteenth century, Kant gave to the world his 
great tract entitled ' ' Eternal Peace, ' ' in which he an- 
ticipated all that any one has been trying to say about 
peace from that time to this. He laid the foundations 
of international peace in profound philosophy. 
Here are a few of the sideheads in this essay : 

First. No conclusion of peace shall be held to be valid 
as such when it has been made with the secret reservation 
of the material for a future war. 

Second. No state having an existence by itself — whether 
it be small or large — shall be acquirable by another state 
through inheritance, exchange, purchase or donation. 

Third. Standing armies shall be entirely abolished in the 
course of time. 

Fourth. No national debts shall be contracted in con- 
nection with the external affairs of the state. 

Fifth. No state shall intermeddle by force with the con- 
stitution or government of another state. 

Sixth. No state at war with another shall adopt such 
modes of hostility as would necessarily render mutual confi- 
dence impossible in a future peace. 

Here we listen to the first great bugle note of peace, 
sounded by one of the greatest philosophers of all 
time. Whatever we may owe to Emerson and Carlyle, 

51 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

whatever has been achieved in the United States by 
that movement called "Transcendentalism," once an 
object of ridicule but now the subject of sincere 
study, the heart of the thing came from this tutor, 
this little chronic invalid, Immanuel Kant, who said, 
after searching the realms of thought as far as human 
probe could go, after fathoming the human heart as 
deep as human plummet could reach, "Two things 
command my reverence, the sense of 'Ought' within, 
and the starry heavens above. ' ' 

I love Germany, because I love Immanuel Kant ! 

And the third great world-name given us by Ger- 
many is Goethe. 

Historians generally name but four transcendent 
bards in the story of humanity. Leaving out the still 
unsurveyed territory of the far East, we have but 
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. I am in the 
habit of making place for one more, the unknown au- 
thor of Job, and when we have named this quintette it 
is either a brave or an ignorant man that dares men- 
tion a sixth, for, though the sixth may be still in the 
realm of high poetry, he will be outside the realm of 
supreme pre-eminence. Says one writer: "To take 
out Goethe would be to take Germany out of modern 
history," and Goethe is the man who said, "Why 
should I write songs of hate when I do not hate?" 
Said another, "No master, ancient or modern, more 
triumphantly than Goethe has cloven the atmosphere 
of our common breath with lyrical airs. ' } 

Whatever there is in Darwin or Emerson was antic- 
ipated by Goethe. Sterling once wrote to Carlyle, 
"Goethe is not a man to be loved!" Carlyle, Goethe's 
great English interpreter, responded, "Who has the 

52 



WHY LOVE GERMANY 



right to love Goethe ? Who has been up there in that 
high altitude to measure him?" 

Says our own Doctor Hedge of Boston, "Goethe 
lighted his torch at the sun." Said another, "He was 
an optimist, — would let all into heaven ultimately 
with no goats on the outside or on the left hand." 
And still another, "He was a son of the morning." 
If we would study him concretely, two titles chal- 
lenge us to a year's study each, aye, a lifetime study. 
It means a high liberal culture to know Faust and 
Wilhelm Meister. When Faust, the champion of 
beauty, first saw Helena, the typical representative of 
Greece and Greek art, he exclaimed : 
Eye and heart to her I tender, 
I inhale her gentle light; 
Blinding all, such beauty's splendor 
Blinded my poor senses quite. 

I forgot the warder's duty, 
I forgot the entrusted horn; 
Threaten to destroy me, — Beauty 
Tameth anger, tameth scorn. 

Mignon, in Wilhelin Meister, represents the undy- 
ing power of the unsatisfied soul, the ever-longing and 
ever-hungering human heart. Here is her pathetic 
song: 

Such let me seem till such I be — 
Take not my snow-white dress away ! 
Soon from this dusk of earth I flee 
Up to the glittering lands of day. 

There first a little space I rest, 
Then wake so glad to scenes so kind ; 
In earthly robes no longer drest, 
This band, this girdle, left behind. 

53 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

Through little life not much I toiled, 
Yet, anguish long this heart has wrung ; 
Untimely woes my blossom spoiled, 
Make me again forever young. 

Faust was the product of sixty years' work. Its 
author began it when a young man, he died with it 
unfinished, and it is still divinely incomplete. Through 
the many vicissitudes of life, sin and disappointment, 
through wrong as well as right, this soul is developed 
until he arrives where he hears the chorus beatific 
beckoning him by that unexplained and unexplainable 
thing which he calls "The Eternally- Womanly, ' ' — 
"Das Ewig-Weibliche." 

All that doth pass away 

Is but a fable; 
All that eludes is made 

Here true and stable. 
The Indescribable 

Here it is done, 
The Ever- Womanly 

Beckons us on. 

All things transitory 

But as symbols are sent; 
Earth's insufficiency 

Here grows to event. 
The Indescribable, 

Here it is done, — 
The Woman-Soul leadeth us 

Upward and on! 

Whatever is meant by this "womanly-soul," you 
may be sure it is something more than a person of 
the feminine gender. It is not the woman, but it is 
the womanly element in every soul; that which is 

54 



WHY LOVE GERMANY 



possessed by the gentle and loving everywhere, the 
mother-side of life, which reveals itself in masculine 
as well as in feminine hearts. 

If we would know how much we are indebted to this 
one of the four or five great world-poets, let us turn 
still further, to "Wilhelm Meister," the greatest 
pedagogical study in modern literature. Here Goethe 
interprets the development of the human soul and 
leads his subject up and on until he comes to the ideal 
school for the training of boys. Here he shows that 
the greatest and highest gift of culture, — the one 
grace which, he says, must always be acquired, which 
no one was ever born possessing, is Reverence. In this 
ideal school, on occasions calculated to awaken high 
emotion, either of love or fear, as when an aged per- 
son visited it, when a funeral procession passed by or 
marriage bells were heard, the small boys were in- 
structed to fold their arms before them and cast their 
eyes reverently upward to contemplate the beauties 
and the marvels of that which is above. The second 
class, the juniors, were taught to fold their arms be- 
hind them and cast their eyes reverently downward 
in contemplation of the beauty of lowly things. The 
senior class were taught to hang their arms beside 
them and, in military phrase, to "touch elbows," to 
cast their eyes right and left, "get into line" and 
think of the divine in the human, the life that streams 
through the eyes of their fellow beings. This, accord- 
ing to Goethe, is the crowning gift of culture. 

Let these illustrations represent, however inade- 
quately, Goethe 's contribution to civilization, — Mig- 
non, the ever striving soul, the chorus beatific beckon- 
ing the wandering sons of men into higher realms, 

55 



LOVE FOK THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

and Wilhelm Meister, reaching at last the only culture 
that is really worth while, that which adds to the rev- 
erence of life by increasing our appreciation of things 
above, things below, and of things around us. 

But these three masterful names, Luther, Kant and 
Goethe, have had great successors. The thirty-eight 
years from 1724 to 1762 witnessed the birth of Klop- 
stock, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Schiller and Richter, 
as well as Goethe, seven names which Bayard Taylor 
says were ■ ' destined to be an independent, victorious, 
permanent power in the world." I can speak with 
great personal gratitude the name at least of Lessing, 
of whom it is said, ' ' His life was a battle and a march, 
a bitter fight for truth, tolerance and freedom against 
tryanny." His father was a poor preacher, his life 
was cast on hard lines, but he gained the friendship 
of Moses Mendelssohn, perhaps the greatest Jew of 
modern times, a marvelous combination of critical 
ability with artistic power, the father of the great 
tone-master, Felix Mendelssohn. In consequence of 
this acquaintance Lessing was able to write the great 
drama of universal religion, " Nathan the Wise." In 
this drama Jew, Mohammedan and Christian are 
placed in fair comparison and contrast and come to 
the triumph indicated by the classic story of the 
1 * Three Rings, ' ' wherein it is discovered that the best 
qualities in Jew, Christian and Mohammedan are the 
same. "What you call Christian I call Jew," said 
Nathan. And it was Lessing who said, ' l If the Father 
of all were to offer me truth in his right hand, and in 
his left hand the love of and search for truth, I would 
humbly kneel at the left hand and say, 'Father, truth 

56 



WHY LOVE GERMANY 



is for thee alone. Give me the endless power of seek- 
ing for the truth/ " 

I love Lessing, and Lessing was a German of the 
Germans, hence I love Germany. 

Did I know enough I could illuminate a background 
for these prime spirits with a shining line of the great 
scholars of history. One of these was Bunsen, author 
of the book whose very title was argument and con- 
clusion, ' ' God in History, ' ' not i ' God in the Creeds, ' ' 
no, not ' ' God in Bibles, ' ' but ' l God as revealed in the 
life of the nations and the ages. ' ' 

Schleiermacher was the first of a long line of Ger- 
man scholars to interpret to us the Bible by means 
of the so-called " higher criticism, ' ' which has resolved 
the Hebrew scriptures into a literature of priceless 
value. 

Of course, to call the roll of Germany's illustrious 
men is to include almost the entire history of music. 
I have no right to speak of this, but I can call the roll 
of some of the world 's great musicians who have been 
given to the world by Germany, — Beethoven, Men- 
delssohn, Handel, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, 
Wagner — but you know them better than I do and 
can enlarge the list at your convenience. 

I wish I could call the roll of Germany's great art- 
ists, painters and sculptors. You must find them for 
yourselves. I will mention but one, Albrecht Diirer, 
who combined in his own person the prophet, the art- 
ist, the reformer, and the student of beauty. He was 
the brush of the Reformation. At his death he 
caused to be engraved upon his tomb the one word, 
1 ' Emigravit, ' ' — he has emigrated. 

And all these modern men have a background of 



57 



LOVE FOE THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

early history. Among the original documents left us 
by the Latin world is one written by Tacitus, contain- 
ing a learned analysis of the German people of his 
day, and modern historians say there is not much to be 
added except that the study of the following centuries 
has justified Tacitus' estimate of the German people, 
which characterized them in "a language unique in 
the emphasis placed upon the value of the individual 
and upon the domestic quality of their lives. ' ' 

Professor Adams, in his "Civilization During the 
Middle Ages," traces the gifts of Germany to mod- 
ern civilization. One of his chapters is entitled, 
"What Did Germany Add?" He says the Germans 
contributed the idea of national independence and the 
independence of the individual. He traces the much- 
boasted New England town meeting back to the prim- 
itive Germans. Our word "committee" springs from 
that old habit of the German people of committing 
their interests, their cases, to a group of their own 
naming. Adams further tells us that to the Germans 
we are indebted for what he calls "elective mon- 
archy," for they early exercised the right of electing 
their own kings. Lastly, they introduced a system of 
written laws as contra-distinguished from the British 
common law, the unwritten law. All this has come 
down to us from the time we call "barbaric," and is 
linked with the great name of Carolus Magnus, Char- 
lemagne, who carried his love of culture with him onto 
the battlefield and insisted that his soldiers should 
spend a certain number of hours each day in study- 
ing the text-books within their reach. 

So I love the Germany that has been, and I love 
the Germany that is. Oh, I know the gruesome de- 

58 



WHY LOVE GERMANY 



tails you are thinking of, I know something of the 
horrible story of war, for I have been on the march 
and on the battlefield. I know the disintegration of 
ideals that follows militancy. Germany, alas, has this 
past year set the sorry pace for all Europe ; but Ger- 
many as it is represents a union of what was once 
twenty-two independent, quarreling monarchies and 
three or four "free" states. What is now the Ger- 
man Empire is one more step toward that greater 
combination that shall be formed when Teuton and 
British, first cousins, learn again to touch elbows and 
march to the same music. 

Germany indeed has offered two profound contri- 
butions to the future, one the power of discipline, the 
other the mighty potency of men acting in concert, 
the spectacle not only of a whole generation but of 
successive generations moving toward one purpose 
and reaching an efficiency truly sublime. 

All Europe has been preparing for war in the last 
forty years in German terms. England felt that she 
was not prepared unless she could have as many im- 
mense ships and aggregations of soldiers as Germany 
had. Prance was not prepared unless she could line 
up to the military standards of Germany. Russia, 
silent, jealous, took account of Germany and tried to 
follow after. Our own United States, heaven forgive 
her, has been led constantly into interpreting the 
words "safety" and "preparedness" in terms of 
German militancy, which is an abnormal excrescence 
upon the Germany of Luther, of Kant, of Goethe and 
of Lessing. I love the normal Germany, its spiritual 
kingdom, and I watch with anxiety the nations of the 
world as they are led through bitterness to distinguish 

59 



LOVE FOE THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

between the true Germany that produced the men I 
have mentioned and the false Germany that boasts of 
the philosophy of " blood and iron/' the iniquitous 
entailment of the worst man that ever wrote his name 
in German history as measured by the results, — Bis- 
marck. 

I deny that Germany must be dismissed from the 
pale of civilization on account of these lurid lights in 
the foreground. It is my business on Sunday, in the 
name of Religion, to move the previous question, to 
go back to that other Germany which developed the 
printing-press and which sang the great songs of com- 
mon life and nobility. 

I love the Germany that was, and I will believe in 
Germany as it is, because I love the Germany that is 
to come. I love the Germany that I have never seen, 
that I am utterly unable to understand, for I have 
never visited her great cities, with one or two excep- 
tions, and never drank in her great classics in their 
original tongue. I love her for what I know not. I 
love her because she is going some day to be neighbor 
to France and again first cousin to England and joint 
heir with Russia to the best things in Europe. 

I love the Germany which takes in not only Luther, 
but his beloved "Kate," the "Katrina" that he teased 
in German. Do we make too much of Germany's con- 
tribution to our lives in terms of individuality? No. 
If transcendentalism means anything, we know that 
Carlyle lighted his lamp at the Goethe altar and Em- 
erson confessed his kinship. If there is anything in 
German philosophy it is the individualism of the 
spirit, the freedom of the soul. 

But here comes another striking truth, namely, that 

60 



WHY LOVE GERMANY 



socialism is at home in Germany. The modern Euro- 
pean hunger for democracy has found perhaps its best 
expression there. Somewhere and somehow the larger 
synthesis is coming in the wake of German thought 
and action. 

The books tell us that the Christian gospel was car- 
ried to Germany by the English Winifred, to whom 
was given the name " Boniface, " — Good-doer/' — but 
that after many had confessed their Christ they still 
held their old loyalty to the god Donnar and on fes- 
tival days gathered around the great oak tree that 
stood for false superstitions. One day, as the story 
goes, the good monk from England attended one of 
these festivals under the branches of the sacred oak. 
He had brought with him an ax, and he proceeded to 
"lay the ax at the root of the tree" until it fell, to 
the horror of even his Christian friends, who protested. 
But not until that mistaken seat of power was felled 
was the way open for the new gospel. Militarism, the 
apparent foundation of might, is an alarming weak- 
ness. It is the tree of false superstition, the source of 
weakness, the sign of decay. It must be destroyed 
root and branch. Immanuel Kant and Lessing, and 
most of all, Luther, aye, and back of him the giant 
Charlemagne, with all his crudeness, saw the absolute 
need and dominant value of culture and training on 
lines of peace if the nation is to live and prosper. 

We love the Germany that is to come into a great 
democracy at no remote date. 



61 



The English have a scornful insular way 
Of calling the French light. The levity 
Is in the Judgment only, which yet stands; 
For say a foolish thing but oft enough 
(And here's the secret of a hundred creeds, 
Men s^t opinions as boys learn to spell, 
By re-iteration chiefly) the same thing 
Shall pass at last for absolutely wise, 
And not with fools conclusively. 



And so I am strong to love this noble France, 
This poet of the nations, who dreams on 
And wails on (while the household goes to wreck) 
For ever, after some ideal good,—- 
Some equal poise of sex, some una vowed love 
Inviolate, some spontaneous brotherhood, 

Some wealth, that leaves none poor and finds none tired, 
Some freedom of the many that respects 
The wisdom of the few. Heroic dreams! 
Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake: 
And sad to use such lofty scaffoldings, 
Erected for the building of a church, 
To build instead a brothel . .or a prison- 

May God save France! 

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

From "Aurora Leigh." 



63 



IV. 

Why Love France 

Why do I love France? It is not for me to speak 
with authority, however appreciative I may be, of the 
place of France in art, in science, in letters, albeit to 
call the mere roll of French contributors to civiliza- 
tion is like reading one of Walt Whitman's poems. 
It is to find oneself enriched, quickened, stirred be- 
yond any power of explanation. 

Think of the French artists, — Corot, Troyon, Dau- 
bigny, Rosa Bonheur, Ary Scheffer, Meissonier, Je- 
rome, Bougereau, Dupre and Millet. 

Think of her musicians, — Gounod, Berlioz, Chopin 
and their fellows. 

Think of her great novelists and contributors to 
permanent letters, — Dumas, Balzac, Corneille, and 
Moliere, who said: "I see a king, but his name is not 
Louis XIV — it is the people, the sovereign people, — 
a word as great as eternity." Think of Fontaine, 
Bossuet, Theirry. Think of Michelet, the Roman 
Catholic, who gave his literary skill to write a stand- 
ard life of the heretic Luther. Think of Guizot, the 
historian, and of Taine, who has out-Englished the 
Englishmen in his interpretation and appreciation of 
English literature. 

Equally stirring and thrilling to the informed mind 
is the list of the fathers of sociology, the pioneers of 
socialism, — Fourier, Prudhon, Louis Blanc, and De 
Tocqueville, who for generations, if not up to the 
present day, offered the best interpretation of the 

65 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

government of the United States. Ponder over the 
names of the great scientists and philosophers, — Buf- 
fon, Auguste Comte, Victor Cousin, Condorget, Ber- 
t helot ; the great chemist of the age, Milne Edwards ; 
Charcot, who made his great contribution to psycho- 
therapy, the study of hysteria, hypnotism, etc. ; and 
Leverrier, the mathematician, who discovered the 
planet Neptune by mathematical processes alone. All 
these were French. 

Think of the splendid pioneers in the realm of 
scholarship. It was Champollion who, in deciphering 
the Rosetta Stone, gave to civilization the key that un- 
locked the mystic lore of the elder Egypt. Anquetil 
du Perron, a college bred lad only nineteen years of 
age, read that some English merchants had brought 
home from India a ' i dead book, ' ' a bible that was ab- 
solutely silent because all those who had loved it and 
could once read it were dead. "With the ardent, 
prophetic nature characteristic of the French, this 
boy student, already saturated in Oriental study, 
said it could not be that the belief of a people so 
far developed as to formulate a bible could pass 
out of the world. So, penniless and friendless, 
taking counsel only from within, guided only by 
genius and the inspirations that trust it, he tore 
himself away from the University of Paris and 
enlisted under a fictitious name in a French regi- 
ment that was to do service in India. Hoping to 
secure passage to India and trusting Providence 
for an opportunity of deserting at the opportune time, 
he started out in search of a buried language and 
a disproof of the insinuation that humanity was 
made up of such careless stuff that it would permit 

66 



WHY LOVE FRANCE 



the religion of a great people to pass out of life and 
existence. Then something happened which I fear 
could have happened in no other place on the globe. 
We can hardly think of the United States, boastful 
as it is of its republicanism, as doing otherwise than 
sending an officer to arrest and bring home for discip- 
line a man who had enlisted under a fictitious name. 
But the French government said, if such a great 
spirit has possessed the boy it is for us to encourage 
it. So he was released from soldier duty with an 
order on the government insuring sufficient money 
to proceed in his search. He went to India, and for 
eight long years he struggled with disease, supersti- 
tion and distrust, the greatest opposition arising from 
the fear on the part of the guardians of the obscure 
book that this Christian would prove treacherous and 
that he would not treat their religious treasure 
worthily. But at last he conquered their distrust 
and came back with the key to their bible. With the 
ardor of a Frenchman, instead of going home to 
Paris he must needs go first to Oxford and examine 
the "dead book" to see if he could read it, and he 
could. Retiring again from the world and 
leading the obscure life of a recluse, he spent eight 
years more in preparing a grammar of the Zend lan- 
guage which, when published, was received with cold 
disdain by scholastic Europe. The brave French 
scholar died under the suspicion that he was a fraud 
or that he had been imposed upon. One black spot on 
the high fame of England's greatest scholar in this 
realm of research, Sir William Jones, is that he lent 
himself to the ridicule and the discounting of this 
great achievement. But subsequent research has justi- 
ce 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

fied Du Perron 's discovery, and now for a pittance 
we can buy the Zend-Avesta, the bible of the Parsi, 
which contains the accredited records of the life and 
message of Zoroaster. 

Let ns not forget that we owe to French insight and 
courage this contribution to the intellectual and spir- 
itual life of Europe and America. 

The adventures of France in the discoveries of the 
world offer a thrilling study. This western continent 
attracted the Spanish explorers in search of gold, in 
quest of the Eldorado, or the fountain of youth. Eng- 
land came for territory, but France came in the inter- 
est of the Cross and took possession of the New 
World for Christianity. The French explorers dotted 
our map with evidences of their consecration to an 
ideal. The earlier Frenchmen were not concerned 
with sordid greed or coarse savagery. Open the atlas 
of this country anywhere and you will find such names 
as Marquette, La Salle, Hennepin, Tonti, St. Louis, 
St. Paul, St. Charles, St. Joseph, St. Lawrence; and 
most of these names were placed there by French 
adventurers in the interest of an ideal. Many of them 
commemorate men who were, in truth and deed, 
priests of Christianity, consecrated to the gospel of 
love. 

France has not been wanting in thinkers, bold in- 
vestigators, radicals if you will, representing the rad- 
icalism that seeks the roots of things, not the uproot- 
ing of things, as radicalism is still too often interpre- 
ted. In the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux 
gathered around him the studious. John Calvin 
builded on Bernard's achievements, and then followed 
Abelard, with his romantic contributions both to 

68 



WHY LOVE FRANCE 



religious freedom and to literature. Hallam says in 
his "Middle Ages" that from the fourth to the twelfth 
century there was no permanent contribution to lit- 
erature. From Boethius to the letters of Abelard and 
Heloise there is nothing to break the awful literary 
silence of the Dark Ages. These letters ushered in 
the new era of literature. 

So I must love France in spite of the distressing 
stories of her innumerable Louises and Francises, the 
long, tempestuous line of profligate and wicked kings, 
for France, through it all, has stood for ideals that 
were forging ahead toward democracy. Over against 
the dogmatic Bernard stands Abelard, the champion 
of academic freedom, the first man in medieval times 
to break from monastic standards. It was his wont 
in Paris to lecture on astronomy, philosophy, poetry, 
art and literature; indeed, as one biographer says, 
"upon everything under the sun as well as theology/' 
He drew about him a student body that numbered at 
one time five thousand. Here is as good a place as 
any to mark the beginning of the modern university. 
It began in the lecture assembly that gathered around 
Abelard and led to the establishment of what he called 
the " Paraclete," the "Comforter." The students built 
for him a stone house while they contented them- 
selves with brush bivouacs and rude shacks. 

Let me say the same thing over again, but try to 
state it a little more clearly. I love France because 
it is the home of the dreamer, and to call the names 
of these dreamers is sufficient to compel even us Eng- 
lish readers to love France. To listen to this roll-call 
is to be ushered into the company of thinking leaders, 
revivifying, inspiring, daring pioneers of thought. 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

Among these were Chateaubriand, Madame De Stael, 
Voltaire, Rousseau ; and De Lamennais, who unfrocked 
himself and ordered that when he died he should be 
buried in a plain box and carried to the pauper's 
trench on a dray. He prohibited priests from speak- 
ing any words over his body that he might more 
effectively emphasize his protest against the tyranny 
of priests and better serve the democracy in which he 
believed. Victor Hugo, Millet, Renan, Charles Wag- 
ner and, to hark still further back, Diderot, Mari- 
beau, Racine, all represent a unique category in the 
history of civilization. Other nations have had their 
dreamers, but dreaming has scarcely been the charac- 
teristic of other nations as it has been of France. 
France, like other nations, has been steeped in vio- 
lence and drenched in blood. But the French revolu- 
tionary masters in all times have been led into the 
fiery vortices not by tyrants but by poets. Mark the 
difference ! Not by those who were seeking conquest, 
but by those who would champion liberty, and if need 
be flood the world with blood in the interest of free- 
dom. 

To call the roll of the dreamers is a work clearly 
beyond me. But let one of our own poets interpret 
for us one of the pioneer dreamers in France, albeit 
an humble dreamer in pottery, an idealist who 
dreamed of the cup from which you drank your 
coffee this morning, a cup finished with an enamel 
hard and white, smooth and enduring. Palissy, the 
potter, occupies but a thumb-spot in that radiant line 
of Frencli dreamers into whose triumphs we have 
entered. 

70 



WHY LOVE FRANCE 



Who is it in the suburbs here, 
This Potter, working with such cheer, 
In this mean house, this mean attire, 
His manly features bronzed with fire, 
Whose fugulines and rustic wares 
Scarce find him bread from day to day? 
This madman — as the people say, 
Who breaks his tables and his chairs 
To feed his furnace fires, nor cares 
Who goes unfed if they are fed, 
Nor who may live if they are dead? 
This alchemist with hollow cheeks 
And sunken, searching eyes, who seeks 
By mingled earths and ores combined 
With potency of fire to find 
Some new enamel, hard and bright, 
His dream, his passion, his delight? 

Oh Palissy! within thy breast 
Burned the hot fever of unrest; 
The exultation, the divine 
Insanity of noble minds 
That never falters nor abates, 
But labors and endures and waits, 
Till all that it foresees, it finds, 
Or what it cannot find, creates! 

Thus has Longfellow condensed the story of one of 
the humblest of the French dreamers. I ask you to 
translate this poem into a description of the shining 
line of spiritual leaders whom France offers to our 
stud}^ Says one of Victor Hugo, "He filled the 
nineteenth century with his personality as Voltaire 
did the eighteenth." The nineteenth century has 
not unfittingly been called "The Victor Hugo cen- 
tury." George Sand, his woman colleague, shall I say, 

71 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

in the realm of philosophy, was said to be ever "bat- 
tling with institutions. She traveled various roads 
but all of them leading to Utopia.'' "I write books," 
she said, "hoping to make people less unhappy." 
Again she said : 

The dogma of Hell is a monstrosity, an imposture, a bar- 
barism. It is impious to doubt God's infinite pity and to 
think that he will not always pardon even the most guilty 
of men. 

She believed firmly in the existence of God and in 
the immortality of the soul. She herself said : 

I see future and eternal life before me as a certainty. It 
is like a light and, thanks to its brilliancy, other things can- 
not be seen, — but the light is there, and that is all I need. 

Of Lamartine it has been said: "In place of the 
poet's lyre with seven chords, the muse gave him the 
human heart to play on with its strings. ' ' 

But if these children of light are to be excluded 
from the story of France and that of the French peo- 
ple under a bill of exceptions, if we grant that they 
are but brilliant spots on a stupid or degraded level 
of life, my point would still be maintained, that 
France has been the home of potencies that honor 
it as the home of dreams and glorify it as the land of 
ideals. 

I was told the other day of a workingman in poor 
clothes who was listening to a stranger pleading the 
cowardly arguments for "security," arguing for bet- 
ter "protection." He asked of the stranger sitting 
next to him, "Who is that man?" Why, he is a well 
known college man whose name is familiar to all col- 
lege men from ocean to ocean." And the laboring 
man exclaimed, "Why, that man has not as many 

72 



WHY LOVE FRANCE 



ideals as I have ! " I do not know whether that work- 
ingman was a Frenchman in the body or not, but he 
was a characteristic Frenchman in the spirit. He 
was a spiritual descendant of Millet, of Madame de 
Stael, of Victor Hugo, of Renan, aye of Rouget de 
1 'Isle, defender of an ideal, who wrote the Marseillaise. 
Here I must tell once more the story which I love to 
repeat. As the nineteenth century was drawing to a 
close, a French editor took a newspaper vote on the 
question, "Who was the greatest Frenchman of the 
nineteenth century ?" It is said that a million and 
a half votes were sent in and they came from the 
humblest of peasants and those high in rank and 
from all along the line between. When these votes 
were counted, to the surprise of everyone, — and per- 
haps to that of no one more than the editor himself, — 
it was found that the name first on the list was not 
that of a crowned head, a man of the sword, not 
a man on horseback or captain of industry, master of 
finance, philosopher, sage, poet or orator, but an ob- 
scure man of the laboratory, one who had spent his 
days in dealing with solvents and lenses, a man who 
had traced disease to its lair, who had stood between 
the French peasant and the pest that was destroying 
his vines, — Pasteur, the greatest of nineteenth cen- 
tum Frenchmen! The next name on the honor roll 
was that of one whom France could not endure, whom 
Paris, while he lived, spewed out of its mouth, banish- 
ing for eighteen years the man who chose to be the 
unfrocked bishop of exiles, the man who interpreted 
the last days of the condemned, the great throbbing 
humanitarian,Victor Hugo. The third name was that 
of one who perhaps did more than any other one 

73 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

man to secure the general electorate and plant the 
republic of France on a permanent basis, — Grambetta. 
Fourth on the list appeared the small, mean, little, 
diminishing, disappearing, rapidly being forgotten 
Napoleon Bonaparte. Should such a vote be taken in 
the middle of the twentieth century, I venture to say 
that even college graduates would ask, "Well, who 
was Napoleon? What did he ever do to be remem- 
bered ?" This vote was the heart of France, showing 
who are the men it wears upon its breast as its heroes 
and its representatives. 

Am I not justified in saying that France is the home 
of dreamers? My plea could perhaps be more effec- 
tive than I am making it if I were to use the remain- 
der of my time in quoting from this great humanita- 
rian, Victor Hugo, who has enriched not only France 
but the reading world with his mountainous stories, 
"Les Miserables, ' ' "Notre Dame de Paris/ ' "Ninety- 
Three," and the others. These books have burst the 
bounds of fiction and become historic studies, crite- 
rions of art, handbooks of morals and the resource of 
the devout, where a soul may saturate itself in the 
divine harmonies of love, hope and faith. In his 
' ' Ninety-Three ' ' he says : 

Amnesty is to me the grandest word in the human lan- 
guage. 

And again he says to the agitator and disturber : 

If we are to lose the privilege of pardoning, of what use 
is it to conquer? 

An accurate adjustment of proportions is a good thing, 
but harmony is still better. The lyre stands higher than the 
scales. Your republic deals with the material interests of 

74 



WHY LOVE FBANOB 



man, mine transports him to the skies. Equity stands 
higher than justice. 

These are the rungs in the ladder that lends to God : 
"Father, mot her, master, city, c6untry, humanity." Here is 

where we begin to meet (!<><! face to face in the great cathe- 
dral of humanity. 

Be makes a man say to liis daughter: "You would 
have military service obligatory.' ' And so some of 
our college presidents and superintendents of schools 
say yet. But Hugo adds : 

I demand the same for education. You dream of man 
the soldier, I of man the citizen. You wish him to strike 
(error; I would have him thoughtful You would have a re 
publio of swords, while I would like to establish a republic 
of minds. 

Victor Hugo's books are books of democracy. Me 
says, " Women may be weak, but mothers are strong, M 
And again : 

Speak liberty to the intellect, equality to the heart, fra- 
ternity to the soul, and you would re-establish democracy. 

But I can give no more* time to these great children 
of genius to speak for themselves. 

Bartholdi's statue of liberty in New York harbor 
is the product, more or less successful, of one genius 
in sculpture, but this is the smaller fact that lies back 
of the glory and power of the statue. Other sculp- 
tors might do as well or better, other nations have 
produced great masters in clay, b\it that bronze figure 
holds aloft the torch of liberty enlightening the world 
because of the contributions of the French people, the 
peasants' coppers, the silver of the bourgeois, the gold 
of the rich, — a popular contribution coming out of 

the hear! of the sister republic that is now drenched 

75 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

in blood, its surface scarred by trenches, its homes 
marred by cruel barbed wire obstructions. Sometimes 
I wonder, if, after all, when this war is over, as it will 
be some day, the columns of republicanism, the con- 
quering triumphs of democracy may not be led, — not 
by the favored United States, so boastful of its free- 
dom, so smug with its "Monroe Doctrine/' which it 
stands for in letter and violates in spirit, — but by this 
dreaming republic of Europe. Perhaps France will 
yet lead in the way that will bring at the end of the 
twenty-first century a Europe without crowns, with- 
out thrones, without standing armies, without fortifi- 
cations and battleships that link the civilization of the 
twentieth century with the brutality of the Dark Ages. 
Dare we not hope that the end of the twenty-first cen- 
tury will be illumined with an international com- 
pact such as these French dreamers have prophesied, 
an international court for which Victor Hugo pleaded 
with such eloquence as President of the First World 
Peace Congress held in Paris in 1849? At the end 
of his address the Catholic Archbishop of Paris 
fell into the arms of the great radical preacher, M. 
Coquerel,, the forerunner of Charles Wagner, and 
they wept on each other's shoulders, so moved were 
they by the prophecy of an international comity that 
would bind not only the nations but the religions of 
the world together in loving co-operation. Says Hugo 
fittingly : 

Men of genius form a dynasty, indeed there is no other. 
They wear all the crowns, even those of thorns. 

In that eloquent introduction which Hugo wrote 
for his son's translation of Shakespeare into French, 
we find this characteristic story. The exiles were 

76 



WHY LOVE FRANCE 



gathered together in the house at Guernsey. Father 
and son sat on the porch one evening in the quiet 
twilight. Said the son, ' i How long do you think the 
exile will last?" The father said, "A long, long 
while." Said the son, "What are you going to do 
meanwhile V ' "I will watch the waves and rejoice 
in their splendor and freedom,' ' answered the father. 
Said the son, "I am going to translate Shakespeare 
into French," and competent critics say that he has 
achieved a most wonderful translation, while the 
father furnished a radiant introduction which is 
really a study of genius in its power. In this he says, 
speaking of the poverty of history : 

Of Fernando Cortez, who ravaged America, history 
speaks; but not of Martin Behaim, who guessed its 
existence. 

If a man has "cut to pieces" his fellow-men, if he has 
"put them to the edge of the sword," if he has "made them 
bite the dust," — horrible phrases, which have grown hide- 
ously f amiliar, — whatever this man's name may be, you will 
find it in history. Search there for the name of him who 
invented the compass, — you will not find it! 

Hugo glories in the rise of that other man who will 
bring about 

The diminution of the men of war, of violence, of prey; 
the indefinite and superb expansion of the men of thought 
and of peace; the entrance of the real giants upon the scene 
of action : this is one of the greatest facts of our great era. 

Then he cries : 

Lift up your eyes, the supreme drama is enacting! The 
legions of light are in full pursuit of the hordes of flame. 

The masters are going out, the liberators are coming in. 

The hunters of men, the trailers of armies, Nimrod, Sen- 
nacherib, Cyrus, Rameses, Xerxes, Cambyses, Attila, 

77 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander, Caesar, Bonaparte, — 
all these vast, ferocious men are vanishing. 

Slowly they flicker out; now they touch the horizon; mys- 
teriously the darkness attracts them; they have kinship 
with the shades, — hence their fatal descent; their resem- 
blance to the other phenomena of night draws them on to 
this dreadful union with blind immensity — submersion of 
all light. Oblivion, that shadow of darkness, awaits 
them 

While smitten with the fatal wanness of approaching 
doom, the flamboyant pleiad of the men of violence de- 
scends the steep slope to the gulf of devouring time; lo! 
at the other extremity of space, where the last cloud has 
but now faded, in the deep sky of the future, azure for- 
evermore, rises, resplendent, the sacred galaxy of the true 
stars, — Job, Homer, Aeschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Phidias, 
Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Washington . . . 
and this marvellous constellation, brighter from moment to 
moment, radiant as a tiara of celestial diamonds, shines in 
the clear horizon, and, as it rises, blends with the boundless 
dawn of Jesus Christ. 



78 



Italy, my Italy! 

Queen Mary's saying serves for nie — 

(When fortune's malice 

Lost her — Calais)— 
Open my heart and you will see 
Graved inside of it, "Italy." 
Such lovers old are I and she: 
So it always was, so shall ever be! 

— Robert Browning 

From "De Gustibtis." 



79 



"DA BOY FROM ROME." 

To-day ees com' from Ketaly 

A boy ees leeve een Rome. 
An' he ees stop an' speak weeth me — 

I weesh he stay at home. 

He stop an' say "Hallo," to me. 

An* w'en he standin' dere 
I smal da smal of Eetaly 

Steel steeekin' een hees hair, 
Dat com' weeth heem across da sea, 

An 9 een da clo'es he wear. 

Da people bomp heem een da street, 

Da noise ees scare heem, too; 
He ees so clumsy een da feet 

He don't know w'at to do, 
Dere ees so many theeng he meet 

Dat ees so strange, so new. 

He sheever an' he ask eef here 

Bet ees so always cold. 
Den een hees eye ees com' a tear — 

He ees no vera old — 
An', oh, hees voice ees soun' so queer 

I have no heart for scold. 

He look up een da sky so gray, 

But, oh, hees eye ees be 
So far away, so far away, 

An' w'at he see I see. 
Da sky eet ees no gray to-day 

At home een Eetaly. 

He see da glada people seet 

Where wanna shine da sky — 
Oh, while he eesa look at eet 

He ees baygeen to cry. 
Eef I no growl an' swear a beet 

So, too, my frand, would I. 

Oh, why he stop an' speak weeth me, 

Dees boy dat leeve een Rome, 
An' com' to-day from Eetaly? 

I weesh he stay at home. 

— Thomas Augustine Daly 

From "The Little Book of Modern Verse." Hozighton Mifflin Company. 

80 



V. 



Why Love Italy 

Why love Italy ? — I must love Italy, if for no other 
reason than that so many of my friends, guides, 
teachers and inspirers have loved it. 

I love Italy because it holds the dust of Keats and 
Shelley, Walter Savage Landor, Mrs. Browning and 
our own brave Theodore Parker. Italy recalls to me 
the names of the Brownings, George Eliot, Haw- 
thorne, Euskin, Marion Crawford, W. W. Storey, 
and the shining line that my memory fails to record. 
I love Italy for the dear English books and poems it 
has inspired, — Eomola, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del 
Sarto, Old Pictures in Florence, Francis Furini, and 
the greatest book in English poetry outside of Shake- 
speare, "The Eing and the Book/' written, as the 
poet says, out of that "little book, half manuscript, 
half print, for which I paid a lira, which is eighteen 
pence English, just. ' ' I must love Italy for the riches 
of the literature that it has created beyond its own 
boundaries and in other than the vernacular tongue. 

I love Italy for her great inheritance, the mighty 
deposits of the Greek and Eoman world. Even in the 
far-off days of the Syracusians, as Plutarch tells us, 
the fate of Nikias' men working in the quarries was 
softened because some of them could recite lines from 
Euripides, the newest of the Greek poets. 

I love Italy for the mighty Eoman background ; for 
her Brutus, Cato, Cornelia and her jewels, Cincin- 
natus, Julius Caesar, Cicero and all the others. I love 

81 



LOVE FOB THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

Italy for her poets in the mother tongue, — Ovid, Vir- 
gil, Horace, and for the historians that are the joy 
of modern students, — Tacitus, Pliny and their fellows. 

I love Italy for the few good Emperors that she 
counts in her treasury. Rome had Emperors bad and 
good, but most of them were Emperors and they did 
rule and they were not apologized for as the crown- 
wearers are today on the score that they are negative 
quantities whose subjects may boast of their imbecil- 
ity — l ' they will do so little harm ! ' ' I am glad of the 
Emperor Titus, who said, ' ' The day is lost which fails 
to bring some comfort to the humble." I love Anto- 
ninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, whose bronze figure 
stands on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, with extended 
arm protecting his captives of war from the indigni- 
ties of his own soldiers. 

I love Italy for the saints that lived saintly lives, 
those who were enshrined in the loving hearts of the 
multitude before the church gave them tardy canon- 
ization. Perhaps the greatest of these was Benedict, 
who led his monkish force forth from the mountain 
fastnesses of Monte Cassino, chanting the battle song 
that conquered Europe without shedding a drop of 
blood, "Lab or are est or are," — "To labor is to pray." 
With their triple vows of chastity, obedience and pov- 
erty, they conquered savage Europe. They triumphed 
not by force of arms, not by Christian formulas of 
creeds, but by the pacific weapons of love and patience. 
Benedict and his successors were the toiling devotees 
who prayed with axes when there were forests to re- 
move, with spades when there were marshes to be 
drained, with trowels and hammers when there were 
walls to be built; aye, and with the same diligence 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



and modesty, with pen and graver and brush when 
there were manuscripts to copy and books to illumi- 
nate. I love Italy for her "saints" that were saintly. 

I love her none the less for her heretics, — Julian 
the Apostate, Bruno, Campanella, and the long line 
of sufferers who for truth's sake demonstrated that 
science has its martyrs as well as religion, those who 
died for the faith that was too large for the church, 
prophesying a new religion in which we now delight. 
I love Italy for her heroic heretics. 

When, in 1897, I found myself in Rome, yielding 
to an inner guidance I sought the Court of Flowers, 
once called Ragpicker's Square, to stand at the foot 
of the statue of Giordano Bruno before I climbed the 
hill to see the glories of St. Peter's. He who was 
burned nearly three hundred years before had recent- 
ly been honored by a bronze statue erected by the 
students of the University of Italy. This statue rep- 
resents a triumph rising through flames. 

Of course I honor Italy for that long line of scien- 
tists whom it would be pedantry or something worse 
for me to try to name ; but there they stand, the great 
heroes of applied science, — Galileo, Galvani, Volta, 
Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, Father See- 
chi, and the anticipator of Bell, Menicci, who, it is 
claimed, should receive credit for the invention of 
the telephone, down to the great Marconi of the wire- 
less triumph. 

I love Italy for her great navigators, Marco Polo, 
Flavio Civia, who perfected the marine compass, Ver- 
azzani, the discoverer of the Hudson River before 
Hudson ; the Cabots, father and son, who skirted our 

83 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

eastern coast from Florida to Labrador, and Americus 
Vespuccius, who gave us our name, " America.' ' 

Of course here belongs the list, which I will not 
attempt to give, of great tone-masters, the mighty 
musicians that have made not only Italy but Europe 
musical with her triumphs, from away back there 
when Guido of Arezzo invented the musical scale, 
down through Palestrina, Paganini, and a score of 
other musicians whose names you may read in the 
books. 

Then comes that inexhaustible wealth handed 
down to us by the mighty artists of Italy, — Cimabue, 
Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, who was, perhaps, the 
most encyclopedic man of his age, master not only of 
the brush and the chisel, but student of the arteries 
and the stars. I am thinking further of Raphael, 
Titian, Guido Reni, Pra Angelico and the rest of them. 

But to come better within the range of my compre- 
hension and within the purpose of this course of 
studies, I love Italy for its mighty battle in recent 
times for democracy, for its splendid achievements 
toward unity in that war-ridden Europe, — now bris- 
tling, alas, with bayonets. Its later and greater 
triumphs have been those of the thinkers, the poets 
and Leaders in the humanities. 

Three names alone would make the nineteenth cen- 
tury radiant: Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi; Cavour 
the statesman; Mazzini, the prophet; Garibaldi, "the 
Knight Errant of United Italy," as some one has 
called him. The greatest of these is Mazzini, and the 
Least is Garibaldi. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, 
on I of the beat and strain of the situation, "One Maz- 
zini is worth a dozen Garibaldis, because he carries 

84 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



no sword.' ' It is a vivisection of mind and heart to 
dismiss these names with a word. How great is the 
temptation to take all this hour and many others be- 
sides in trying to lift myself and you into a keener 
appreciation of these great potencies that carried ter- 
ror to the hearts of monarchs everywhere. These are 
the men that have set the pace for all the powers of 
Kurope. Krupp has molded no cannon that will 
silence the tongue of a prophet. Guns, powder, dyna- 
mite, and ail the other hellish inventions cannot 
thwart or suppress the love of liberty in the heart of 
the humblest. What did these great potencies of the 
nineteenth century do for Europe? They scared the 
kings, they made the dukes and barons look small, 
they carried consternation into the boards of trade 
and to the dealers in stocks and bonds, the manipula- 
tors of other people's time and strength, those who 
rob the world of its resources and corner its water- 
falls and its forests, its fields and its mines for the 
enhancement of their own wealth rather than for the 
glorification and advancement of man. 

I am seeking an adequate perspective. I am trying 
to hold Italy far enough away so that we may discover 
the major peaks in this Italian mountain-range of 
soul. The Alps and Apennines are great mountain 
ranges, but upon closer study and more intimate ac- 
quaintance they are seen to break upward into a few 
great peaks that pierce the clouds to receive the first 
greetings of the sun and wear the glory of snow and 
ice, of shade and sunshine. And we will keep these 
mountain peaks right before our eyes as we try to 
study Italy at long range. There stand three ever- 

85 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

lasting souls, landmarks not only in Europe but in 
human progress, and I dare not suggest the fourth. 

The first of these is Dante, one of the four or five 
great poets of the world, one whom we are just begin- 
ning to understand, not as an interpreter of the Cath- 
olic Church or the conventional faith of the time, 
though he poured his genius into those forms and 
formulas, but as a pioneer of the new learning, one 
who had the foresight to see the new issues. He was as 
radical as Bruno. He dared chuck a Pope head fore- 
most into hell when he deserved it; Dante was the 
great interpreter of the human heart. As another has 
said, he was not simply a poet, but a judge of Italy, 
of Europe, of humanity. He declared a righteous 
verdict upon things past, present and to come. 

Of Michael Angelo Mr/ William Hunt, one of the 
greatest art interpreters in the United States, has said, 
1 ' The ages since Michael Angelo have offered no man 
big enough to interpret him." When Grimm would 
write his biography, he found it necessary to study 
the age in which he lived. And Grimm's life of An- 
gelo is one of the few great books which it is a liberal 
culture to know. Of Angelo it is said that he was 
born with three souls, the soul of a painter, a sculptor 
and an architect, and that, after he had turned sixty, 
there came into his life great tides of human love, 
mighty torrents of a man's love for a woman, a 
woman that was worthy of such love, and to the three 
souls already his, was added the fourth, the soul of 
the poet. His sonnets stand with the dome of St. 
Peter, with the tombs of the Medici, and the illumina- 
tions on the walls of the Vatican, witnessing to the 
mighty power of this four-souled man, Michael 

86 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



Angelo, who accomplished what Julian the Emperor 
tried to do and failed, — picked up the lost inspirations 
of Greece and blended them with the Christianity of 
his time to make place for these neglected elements in 
civilization. He brought the classic world down into 
his own time and marked the era which we call the 
Renaissance, the New Birth of the new learning, — 
better call it the Re-birth of the Old Learning. 

The third name is Columbus. He gave us one-half 
of the world we delight in. He made room for the 
pent-up forces of genius to expand in this new world, 
and, stumbingly, but effectively, established that 
which dreamers had foreseen. 

Were there need for other reasons why I love Italy, 
I need but call the roll of her great cities, — Rome, 
Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples. But you have all 
been over that fascinating ground either in imagina- 
tion or in reality. Let me stick to my humbler task. 
In 1897 Bishop Keane, now Archbishop of Iowa, was 
my gracious host in Rome. He had been my yoke- 
fellow in the Parliament of Religions and was at that 
time director of the Catholic University at Washing- 
ton. In his room in Rome, with his arm around my 
neck, he said, "Brother Jones, you have come to study 
ancient Rome. Here you will find the elder world 
fronting you on every hand, you cannot be disap- 
pointed. And if you stay a little longer you will 
learn to love present Rome, for there is much here 
that is charming and delightful ; but I tell you, demo- 
crat, radical and American as you are, if you stay 
here long enough you will find that the Rome of today 
is the capital of the present world and the conserver 
of the future interests of the world in a very real way. 



87 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TOEN PEOPLES 

There are no interests that enlist your sympathies, no 
causes that you are engaged in but have their lines 
reaching out and across the water, under the seas, 
over the mountains, here in Rome. Rome is still the 
capital city of the world. ' ' 

In words like these did my friend put me on my 
honor, giving me a task upon which I have been 
working ever since, — that of justifying and appreci- 
ating the Rome of today. Perhaps the good bishop 
was too partial, but one thing was very clear, he was 
keenly alive to the distresses of Italy at that time, — 
and they have scarcely grown less at the present. It 
is true that Italy is not simply the treasure-house of 
the past ; it is the battle-ground of the future. 

I am no prophet or the son of a prophet, but I ven- 
ture the hope, — I will not call it a prophecy, — that the 
next great European republic to be born will be the 
republic of Italy, the next crown to be dispensed with 
will be the Italian crown. The republic of Italy is 
already well under way because the genius of history 
is there enthroned. 

Why is Italy spoken of in the feminine gender? 
Why did Browning call it tenderly "that woman 
country, ' ' and declare that if his heart were examined 
after his death the word " Italy' ' would be found 
engraved thereon? Italy represents indubitably the 
gentler side of civilization because it represents so 
much art. Italy embodies politically that mystic 
phrase borrowed from Goethe, "The eternally- 
womanly. ' ' Not the feminine gender, not the woman 
as against the man, but the womanly side in the man 
as well as in the woman, the maternal element in 
Providence, the love deposit in Nature, that which 

88 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



is ever alive to the beautiful, whether it be beauty 
in marble, on canvas, in tone, or in thought made 
lyric in language. 

Because Italy is so immersed in the inspirations of 
art it is again necessarily committed to democracy. 

Those who read closely know that Victor Emman- 
uel, the first King of United Italy, was a compromise, 
a stepping-stone in the thought of Mazzini, Cavour 
and Garibaldi. Garibaldi wore the red cap of Lib- 
erty, and the dream of these three men was a free 
Italy that is yet to arrive, that is to be born out of 
its rich past. "A free church and a free State" were 
the last words that fell from the lips of Cavour. 

Some is the city of fountains. how the water 
gushes around, how charming are its purling, bub- 
bling, bountiful fountains ! None of your weak, drip- 
ping, economical little streams that we call fountains 
in Chicago, or even in New York or Boston, but great 
mountain streams, pouring down ungrudgingly out of 
their abundance. The noblest of them all, as I re- 
member them, was the Fontana de Trevi, pouring 
through its triple outlets 13,000,000 cubic feet of 
sparkling water every twenty-four hours. This water 
comes from a distance of fourteen miles through an 
aqueduct, a part of which was built by the Emperor 
Agrippa before Jesus was born. It flows from under 
the feet of a Neptune of stately proportions and 
generous altitude, with splendid figures of Health 
and Fertility on either side. The great basin 
sparkles with this Aqua Virgo, so named because 
tradition has it that a young girl first directed a 
thirsty soldier to the spring that was older than the 
city. 

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LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TOSN PEOPLES 

The guide-book says, "The superstitious partake 
of the water of this fountain and throw a coin into 
the basin in the pious belief that their return is thus 
insured. ' ' 

I took my farewell drink from the fountain and 
threw in my nickel. I have not yet returned, but I 
do not need to go, for that fountain still delights me, 
and all the more because the water is brought hither 
through that ancient aqueduct; ancient energy and 
devotion lending their aid to present needs. The 
flowing water is not the water of the first century 
B. C, but it is fresh water up to date at whatever 
time you may visit it. 

Thus it is with these great names of history. 
Bruno's chief offense was that he taught the plurality 
of worlds. He thought there were other worlds than 
ours. When I was in Rome in 1897, I loved to visit 
a very humble monument, easily overlooked, not 
higher than my hand could reach, bearing on its 
top a celestial globe. It was a memorial to Galileo, 
whom the church humilitated because he perfected an 
instrument which interfered with the astronomy of 
Ptolemy, a machine that "scooped ugly valleys in the 
face of the beautiful moon!" 

But Rome is now proud of its astronomical observ- 
atory, and Father Secchi is one of the astronomers 
that the learned world takes note of. A Pope has 
provided for him the best telescope that money could 
buy, one considered, in 1897, the second or third best 
telescope in the world. So I like to think that even 
the "old church itself" has in it, as Bishop Keane 
declared, permanent elements that are sure to tri- 
umph. 

90 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



Out of some four hundred and sixty churches in 
Rome, the books tell me that eighty of them are dedi- 
cated to the Virgin Mary. The mother element in 
religion is universal. These churches might go fur- 
ther and fare worse, might they not? They are on 
the way to that unity for which Bruno died. 

To me the Pantheon disputes with St. Peter's for 
my reverence and, to be frank, I found more inspira- 
tion and comfort in the Pantheon than I did in St. 
Peter's, though St. Peter's is the most gorgeous tem- 
ple now on the globe. It was thirteen centuries in 
building, and the cost has been vaguely estimated at 
sixty million dollars, though it was probably much 
more than that. And still this simple circle of the 
Pantheon, with its low dome and great eye open to 
the sky, a structure which has come down from pre- 
Christian times and is now reconsecrated to Christian 
uses, appealed to me profoundly. The books tell us 
that twenty-eight cartloads of martyr bones were put 
into the floor and around the foundations for the 
reconsecration. Two hundred years or more ago 
Christianity attempted to indicate its Christian use 
by putting a couple of unsightly bell-towers on the 
roof, but later ecclesiastics became ashamed of the 
monstrosities and they have been taken down. Today 
the Pantheon is open to the sky and represents the 
larger Catholicism, the nobler piety that is to come. 

You cannot turn down a street in Eome or read a 
page about Italy without running into a mystery 
that is bound to bloom in prophecy. Everywhere 
here you stand on fertile ground. The soil is charged 
with seed that is to germinate and bear its harvest. 

One of the art treasures as well as one of the art 

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LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

mysteries of the world, the present pride of Venice, 
is the group of bronze horses over the door of St. 
Marks. The story of this quadriga is of itself an 
epic. All agree that it was first modeled by the hands 
of some Greek artist, possibly Praxiteles himself. 
Nero stole the group to decorate his palace in Rome. 
Hadrian continued the use of it, and when the tide 
of war denuded Rome, the horses were carried over 
to Constantinople. When Constantinople fell, they 
were stolen and installed in Venice. Then Napoleon 
laid his vandal hands on them and carried them to 
Paris, where they were kept for a time among the art 
treasures of France. When the power of Napoleon 
waned, art and conscience began their work, and im- 
perial Francis gave back the horses to Venice, where 
they are today, but they are still stolen goods. It 
may be the day is coming when they will be sent back 
to their original home, for a movement is now on 
foot to restore all antiquities to their native habitat 
so far as possible. 

The traveler sees nothing more spectacular in the 
streets of Florence than the grim figures draped in 
black, caring for the sick or bearing away the dead. 
The story of the Misericordia is a fascinating one. 
We are told that away back in the Middle Ages cer- 
tain young men formed an association to reform them- 
selves and elevate their lives. They imposed a fine 
upon themselves every time they were guilty of pro- 
fanity. In time the fund thus produced grew large 
enough for philanthropic uses. This was the begin- 
ning of a brotherhood that submerges the distinction 
between prince and peasant or porter. The man who 
drives the cab and the man who rides in it are equally 

92 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



eligible to this society and equally fortunate if they 
are admitted into the confidences of its membership. 
Here they lay aside all personality, eliminate all 
ranks, and wear this grim black gown, concealing 
head, face and body. The only way you can guess 
at the social quality of the man underneath this garb 
is by looking at his shoes. I suppose some of them 
have higher heels than others. And this continuous 
benediction, still at work, comes down from those 
gruesome days of old. 

The Foundling's Asylum, made perpetually tender 
by the bambini of the Delia Robbia on the outside of 
the walls, has a history even more charming. It 
started back in the Middle Ages by caring for the 
foundlings which were left at night to be called for 
in the morning. In those days, as now, the peasants 
obtained their milk from goats. This asylum provided 
sanitary milk for the babes by keeping a herd of 
goats in the back yard, and whenever a baby cried, 
a mother goat, guided by the divine maternal instinct, 
would trot into the hall and give the baby its nourish- 
ment in the natural way, without danger of intruding 
microbes. But when I visited that asylum, I saw for 
the first time the newly perfected incubators to take 
care of the prematurely born with all the precau- 
tions of science, such as are now familiar to us in 
Chicago; but these precautions were anticipated and 
probably carried out more effectively there than here. 

The Italy that I love is a growing Italy. The pres- 
ent Italy is still unfinished and surges with unrest. 
There is a present issue between Church and State, 
the menace to free thinking is active. Because of 
these things I cherish the hope which I have already 

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LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

voiced that Italy may realize democracy perhaps be- 
fore any other of the present monarchial powers in 
Europe. And it may put us on our mettle, strengthen 
our democratic sympathies and give us a new courage 
to espouse things unpopular, to work on the side of 
the minority. I wonder if, tested by these tests, that 
woman-country committed to the heart of the Uni- 
verse, the mother element in the divine, may not be 
ahead even of us in America. 

Long ago, in his early manhood, Longfellow was 
moved by that wonderful Campanile, Giotto's tower 
in Florence, which is still unfinished. He who climbs 
the tower finds on top adequate abutments left to 
support a continuation which has never been added. 
Longfellow sang : 

In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's tower, 
The lily of Florence blossoming in stone, — 
A vision, a delight, and a desire, — 
The builder's perfect and centennial flower, 
That in the night of ages bloomed alone, 
But wanting still the glory of the spire. 

In later years Robert Browning seems to have 
caught the thought of Longfellow and lifted it into a 
more heroic vision. In his "Old Pictures in Flor- 
ence," after doing tardy justice to the Masters be- 
fore the Masters and making us ashamed of our 
ignorance by telling us, 

If you knew their work, you would deal your dole, 
he closes with a prophecy of what he thinks will hap- 
pen when a certain dotard is pitched over the moun- 
tain, and Italy has gone on its way to freedom, 

Once Freedom restored to Florence, 

How Art may return that departed with her. 

94 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



Go, hated house, go each trace of the Loraiue's, 
And bring us the days of Orgagna hither! 

How we shall prologize, how we shall perorate, 

Utter fit things upon art and history, 
Feel truth at blood-heat and falsehood at zero rate, 

Make of the want of the age no mystery; 
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras, 

Show — monarchy ever its uncouth cub licks 
Out of the bear's shape into Chimaera's, 

While pure Art's birth is still the Republic's. 

He then adds : 

And turn the bell-tower's alt to altissimo : 
And fine as the beak of a young beccaccia 

The Campanile, the Duomo's fit ally, 
Shall soar up in gold full fifty braccia, 

Completing Florence, as Florence Italy. 

Shall I be alive that morning the scaffold 

Is broken away, and the long-pent fire, 
Like the golden hope of the world, unbaffled 

Springs from its sleep, and up goes the spire 
While "God and the People" plain for its motto, 

Thence the new tricolor flaps at the sky? 
At least to foresee that glory of Giotto, 

And Florence together, the first am I! 

I am with him. So are we all. If we could get rid 
of this wretched distrust of the potency of love, of the 
conquering power of ideas, if we could realize the 
imbecility of guns and the powerlessness of gunpow- 
der, we should feel these forces even now, spite of the 
embattled millions, spite of the blood-drenched coun- 
tries, working, regenerating, renewing, ennobling 
democracy, freedom and liberty. Everything that 

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LOVE FOE THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

these blessed men have died for is coming, all that 
the poets have sung for is on its way to realization. 

I cannot close without a word about this "hyphen' ' 
in the name business. It is the dictum of schools that 
he who knows but one language knows none. Another 
academic statement is, Give a man two languages and 
you give him two souls. 

Let us pray, then, for as many souls as possible. 
Not one hyphen is necessary, but many before I can 
write my name as a full-fledged American. Hyphen ? 
Aye, many hyphens. I would be a Cambro-Anglo- 
Teuto-Franco-Italio-Graeco-Judaeo-AMERicAN! Only 
by such words can I honor my country best and only 
in proportion as it waves over such a people does Old 
Glory become glorious. 

Of one other element I must speak. I love 
the Italy that is not in Italy. Of the forty-two 
million Italians in the world today, six millions 
of them are away from home. One hundred 
thousand of them are here in Chicago, five hundred 
thousand are in New York City. In the main, they 
are the despised " dagoes/' the ignored " hewers of 
wood and carriers of water." They are the sewer- 
makers, the railroad-builders, the street-sweepers. 
But believe me, by their sweat they are to triumph, 
out of their toil they are to rise. The degeneracy of 
the United States lies in the blindness of her so-called 
"favored" sons and daughters, who permit their chil- 
dren to call an Italian a "dago," a Jew a "sheeny," 
an Irishman a "Paddy," and to spell negro "with 
two g's." Their speech betrayeth them. By their 
very vocabulary they are convicted of barbaric blind- 
ness and in our complacency and our conceit can be 

96 



WHY LOVE ITALY 



recognized our nionarchial descent, which is doomed 
in the interest of the something better and finer that 
is to come farther along. 

Thomas Augustine Daly saw the pathos and the 
promise of this tide that is reinforcing our world in 
America today, doing the jobs which must be done 
and which we refuse to do, in his poem entitled "Da 
Boy From Rome." 

God forgive us if we have no kinder reception for 
the Italian immigrant than he describes. Here you 
can put your finger on one element of the dry rot in 
the United States. It lies in our conceit, not in the 
tide of wretchedness that comes to our shores from 
the so-called off -scouring of Europe. These represent 
the cream of Europe and without them our progress 
is at an end. 



97 



AMERICA TO RUSSIA 

Though watery deserts hold apart 
The worlds of East and West, 

Still beats the selfsame human heart 
In each proud Nation's breast. 

Our floating turret tempts the main 
And dares the howling blast 

To clasp more close the golden chain 
That long has bound them fast. 

In vain the gales of ocean sweep, 

In Tain the billows roar 
That chafe the wild and stormy steep 

Of storied Elsinore. 

She comes! She comes! her banners dip 

In Neva's flashing tide, 
With greetings on her cannon's lip, 

The storm-god's iron bride! 

Peace garlands with the olive-bough 

Her thunder-bearing tower, 
And plants before her cleaving prow 

The sea-foam's milk-white flower. 

No prairies heaped their garnered store 

To fill her sunless hold, 
Not rich Nevada's gleaming ore 

Its hidden caves infold. 

But lightly as the sea-bird swings 
She floats the depths above, 

A breath of flame to lend her wings, 
Her freight a people's love! 

When darkness hid the starry skies 

In war's long winter night. 
One ray still cheered our straining eyes, 

The far-off Northern light! 



99 



And now the friendly ray is return 

From lights that glow afar, 
Those clustered lamps of Heaven that burn 

Around the Western Star. 

A nation'.** love in tears and smiles 

We bear across the sea, 
O Neva of the banded isles, 

We moor our hearts in thee! 

— Oliver Wendell Holmes 



1UU 



VI. 



Why Love Russia 

Russia is not a country, it is a world. It is not a 
nation, but a federation of peoples. It occupies one- 
seventh of the land surface of the globe. It contains 
one-tenth of the people of the world. The map tries 
to give us in colors one hundred "states," as we 
would call them, but the term is inadequate — better 
say one hundred different provinces or aggregations 
representing in the main differing languages and 
varying traditions. I tried to count in one of my 
books the number of languages referred to in tabula- 
ing the peoples of Russia, and I had reached fifty 
when I became confused and gave it up. Russia has 
domesticated five or six of the great religions of the 
world, peaceably in the main, with one sad and glar- 
ing exception. Many millions of Mohammedans live 
peaceably within her boundaries. Russia reaches 
over into vast regions where the name of XDonfucius 
carries apostolic power. The ancient faith of the 
Brahmin blooms anew in the theosophy of Russia, the 
home of Madame Blavatsky. Although the Czar of 
Russia is the nominal head of the Greek Catholic 
Church, with its pretense of exclusive descent, its 
apostolic succession, the books tell us that there are 
thirty million Russians who are not orthodox Greeks 
and who represent eight Protestant sects, unique and 
strange in name to our western ears, but apparently 
as full of life and autonomy as the Baptist, Metho- 

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LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

dist, Presbyterian and other denominations of Amer- 
ica. 

Russia is comparatively a new name in the history 
of nations. An English writer trying to compare the 
maturity of the present Powers of the world, meas- 
uring their age by the age of man, puts the age of 
England at forty -five, of Germany at thirty, and of 
Russia at eighteen. So we are confronted by this 
giant youth, this crude, colossal, vehement, undiscip- 
lined, as yet ill-organized, youth in the full tide of 
his adolescence. But even in the incipiency of the 
national life of this great country we can see in the 
short perspective of the past a few commanding 
events and a few triumphant names. 

The wonder of human achievement in outward 
building is St. Petersburg, as we used to say, — Petro- 
grad, as we are learning to say. It took centuries 
to build the pyramids. "Rome," as the saying goes, 
"was not built in a day," but St. Petersburg was 
built in nine years from the time the first spade was 
put into the ground to the time when it became the 
royal citadel. It was built in a marsh, where founda- 
tions sank and disappeared, where walls tumbled and 
architects were baffled. But Peter, truly one of the 
great men of history, persisted, working with his own 
hands, toiling like a day laborer, living in a hut. 
With unmeasured wealth behind him, he chose the 
life of the simplest of the peasants. He built his city 
in miles and miles of marsh for the wise and strategic 
reason that his vast empire might have an "eye open 
toward Europe." Sadly has it needed this outlook, 
and wisely, in the main, has it used it. 

But the monument that indicates the greatest tri- 

102 



WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



umph of Peter the Great is now the most beloved and 
admired work of art in Petrograd, for it commemo- 
rates the noblest and most humane of his deeds. While 
suffering from an illness and taking an invalid's walk 
in the park, he saw a peasant woman and child in the 
water drowning. He plunged into the icy stream and 
rescued mother and child, then forthwith went back 
to bed to die from his exposure. The monument is in 
bronze and represents the king standing on a rock, 
bearing on one arm the helpless body of a woman 
and on the other the limp form of a child. This deed 
crowns Peter as i i The Great. ' ' 

We in America back there in '69 and 70 gloried 
in that great triumph that bound the oceans together. 
We celebrated the mountainous achievement of a 
transcontinental railroad from New York to San 
Francisco. But in those very days this " youth' ' in 
the east of Europe was working on a transcontinental 
railroad three times as long as ours, and the project 
has been accomplished, a project compared with 
which our Union Pacific Railroad and our Panama 
Canal are easy achievements, considering the condi- 
tions under which Russia had to struggle. 

But more than any outward achievement is the 
spirit which has made Russia rich in art treasures, 
notable in architectural achievements, commanding in 
its mastery of music. 

We in this country spent four years in a terrible 
fratricidal war, slaughtering a million men in order 
to strike the shackles from off the limbs of four mil- 
lion slaves. Russia anticipated us by a year or two 
in this triumph of justice. She manumitted fifty mil- 
lion serfs by the stroke of a pen and without the loss 

103 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

of a life. More than that, she placed at the disposal 
of these emancipated slaves some forty-three million 
acres of land, making it possible for them to continue 
in their own right the tilling of the soil to which they 
were schooled by tyranny and by slavery. 

Again it was the Emperor of Russia who, in 1898, 
issued that epoch-making Rescript which summoned 
the nations of the world into council to see if the time 
had not come when they could " Cease Firing!" 
' * Ground Arms ! ' ' and devote the energies heretofore 
wasted in the art and science of destruction to more 
pacific pursuits. It was the ' ' Czar of all the Russias ' ' 
who called the attention of the world to the ever-in- 
creasing financial burden on the public prosperity of 
the millions and millions spent annually on weapons 
of destruction, which are no sooner perfected than 
out-grown. He suggested among the points to be dis- 
cussed an agreement of the nations not to increase 
their military and naval forces, but rather to seek 
means of reducing them. He sought to interdict the 
use of any new weapons or explosives ; to forbid the 
throwing of explosives from balloons, and the use of 
submarine torpedoes ; and to neutralize all ships and 
boats engaging in non-military pursuits. The clauses 
relating to these prohibitions were signed by sixteen 
nations but refused by ten. Among these ten, alas ! 
were Great Britain, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, 
and, on several counts, the United States. These 
nations refused to act on the proposition to neutralize 
the skies and the waters below the surface, an Amer- 
ican representative offering as an excuse for delaying 
action concerning bombs from the skies that such 

104 



WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



usage was a contingency too remote for consideration 
just then. 

In 1899 the prophetic conclave was held of twenty- 
six great nations of the world, and seven years later 
forty-four nations were represented in the same place 
for the same purpose. These nations parted with the 
tacit understanding that a third conference should be 
called seven years hence in the interest of further in- 
ternational legislation. 

One more amazing achievement toward the amelio- 
ration of war we must place to the credit of Russia. 
With a stroke of the pen it moved one-seventh of the 
earth's surface on to the " white inap." By legal en- 
actment it placed one-tenth of the people of the globe 
on "dry" territory and proceeded forthwith to con- 
vert what we would call "saloon property" and 
"saloon industries" into school property and educa- 
tional industries. And this edict is working today. 
Russia, I believe, is to stay dry! 

Here, then, are the five great, astounding, unpar- 
alleled triumphs of Russia : 

1. The marvelous city of Petrograd built by the power 
of a human will in nine years. 

2. A transcontinental railroad three times as long as 
ours, built largely through a wild and unsurveyed territory. 

3. The emancipation of fifty million souls, without 
bloodshed, an unparalleled event in the history of rulers, 
a supreme achievement of a king. 

4. The bringing of the western world together to con- 
template the possibility of settling international disputes by 
other means than legalized wholesale murder. 

5. By another stroke of the pen the placing of the vast 
Russian territory at the head of the white column of tem- 

105 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

perance, which in this country moves on so haltingly and 
hesitatingly. 

But even these great outward achievements, the 
emancipation of the slaves under the Czar's Rescript 
and the abolition of Vodka, pale into insignificance 
when compared to the stupendous contribution to civ- 
ilization made by Russian genius. More than for all 
of these and above all of these, I love Russia for Tol- 
stoy, the most beloved man of his age, the man whose 
face was made familiar through pictures to a greater 
number of men in his generation than that of any of 
his contemporaries, with the sole exception of our 
own Abraham Lincoln. Tolstoy was the great Renun- 
ciant of the nineteenth century. Here was a man born 
of a noble, well-nigh royal line, choosing the compan- 
ionship of peasants, vacating the glory and the luxu- 
ries given him, choosing instead the consolation of the 
cobbler's bench and the inspirations of the hay fields. 
He turned aside from the mighty opportunities which 
genius gave him of being easily the greatest fiction 
writer of his age, perhaps, with one exception, the 
greatest fiction writer of any age, his right to primacy 
being disputed only by that other great child of 
genius and lover of man, Victor Hugo. At the height 
of his rising genius, when Europe was begging for 
more, he dropped the pen of a novelist that he might 
more effectively become, after Jesus, the greatest 
parable maker of the world. 

Tolstoy was born to military honors. He would 
have been borne aloft on the shoulders of the army, 
but he turned his back on sword and gun and gave 
his life to the ministry of peace. Words fail me, as 
time fails me, to state adequately the renunciations 

106 



WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



of this Master Renuneiant of the centuries. He would 
not interpret the gift of genius independently of 
conscience. He insisted on interpreting art in terms 
of morality. His eye was trained to beauty, his ear 
tuned to melody, but he said in effect : 

There shall be none of these allowed in my life except 
in so far as I am able to interpret them into the current 
coin of the poorest and into the life of the humblest. 

What are the fundamental elements of Tolstoy's 
message? I would say "Tolstoy's Gospel," except 
that there was nothing unique in it. There was not 
one new accent in the message of Tolstoy except, and 
that is a tremendous exception, that he tried to live 
it. He took the message of Jesus at its face value and 
believed it was workable and, single-handed and alone, 
tried to practice it. "With art, culture, society, monu- 
ments, fashion, wealth on one side, and conscience, 
the New Testament, and the suffering peasants of 
Russia on the other side, he said, "It will work! It 
must work ! ' ' 

At fifty-four years of age Tolstoy yielded to the 
social ambitions of his wife, who was altogether wor- 
thy of his love but lacking his vision. He left the 
rural home to spend the winter in the fashionable 
circles of Moscow, thus to satisfy the alleged needs 
of the rising family. You know how anxious parents 
are to have their children "enjoy social privileges." 
If you are reasonably rich you want them to have the 
advantages of a winter in Boston ; if you are richer, 
they must have at least one winter in Paris; and if 
you are very rich, you are willing to deny them the 
privileges of a domestic, settled home anywhere and 
with them join the Bedouins of the boulevard and 

107 



LOVE FOE THE BATTLE-TOBN PEOPLES 

become weary globe-trottres. All for the sake of the 
dear children, who need just such " privileges. ' ' By 
the same token Tolstoy yielded to the family demand 
and moved into Moscow, where he daily met the awful 
contradictions of modern life. There he saw pow- 
dered gentlemen and perfumed ladies in dainty laces 
being driven to and from the dance in gaily trimmed 
carriages drawn by prancing horses in silver mounted 
harnesses. All of this he might have enjoyed had he 
not at the same time been compelled to see the same 
streets lined with wretched human beings rotting 
from disease, starving and freezing. 

Touched to the quick with this misery, he sallied 
forth with his purse for the purpose of relieving dis- 
tress, but he had not gone far before he realized that 
the giving of private funds was wholly inadequate to 
the great task. His genius carried the question fur- 
ther back and he wrote that searching piece of prac- 
tical sociology, entitled "What to do?" perhaps the 
keenest arraignment of modern social conditions ever 
printed. His diagnosis in the main is as applicable 
to Chicago as to Moscow, varying only in degree. 

Jane Addams once said in the old church across the 
way before the building of Lincoln Centre, "I am in 
the habit of dividing the people with whom I come in 
contact into two classes, those who have read Tol- 
stoy's 'What to Do' and those who have not." To 
which class do you belong? One tiling is sure, your 
reading in sociology has been superficial and you have 
been dealing with secondary authorities if you do not 
know Tolstoy and his deliverances on these lines. If 
you want to deal with "original documents, ' ' read 
Tolstoy. And first and foremost, if you can read 

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WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



but one of his books, read "What to Do," which, like 
most of his books, has been translated into English. 
Tolstoy found five great world evils : 

1. Enmity and anger. 

2. Loose living. 

3. The taking of oaths and the false loyalties involved 
therein, for he rightly interpreted the New Testament 
charge against swearing not as a law against profanity or 
vulgar language, but against subordinate loyalty, unworthy 
devotion. 

4. The resistance of evil by violence. 

5. The distinction between our own nation and for- 
eigners, which leads to war. 

There is nothing very startling in these briefly 
expressed statements of evils that Tolstoy believed to 
exist at that time and which we pretend to deplore. 
Over against these evils he suggested five sovereign 
remedies. 

1. Be at peace with one another; count no one low or 
stupid. 

2. Commit not adultery; resist carnal desires. 

3. Swear not at all ; take no oaths, thereby binding your- 
self to the will of another. 

4. Render not evil for evil; never seek vengeance in the 
name of justice. 

5. Break not the peace; know that all men are brothers. 

This is a hard creed to live up to. But it was not a 
creed but a rule of life to Tolstoy. Back of these five 
commandments he found these five conditions of hap- 
piness. Think them over : 

1. Communion with Nature. 

2. Work. (Not make-believe work, for you and I well 
know that the busiest people in Chicago are people of 
leisure. Oh, the pre-occupations of the indolent!) 

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LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

3. Family life. 

4. Communion with fellow men. 

5. Health. 

In another of Tolstoy's works he makes one of his 
heroes find his creed in three great principles : 

1. That we should not oppose evil with force. 

2. That we should not consume more than we ourselves 
produce. 

3. That men and women should equally practice and as- 
pire towards purity and justice. 

"All very good/' you say, "only they will not 
work." But Tolstoy's retort must be met. "How do 
you know ? They have never been tried. ' ' 

Who can say that the pacific program will not work 
between nations as it does work between millions of 
individuals ? It has never been tried. Centuries long 
has the iron rule dominated, and it has worked very 
badly. It has caused untold millions of deaths and 
the wasting of untold millions of treasure. Civiliza- 
tion after civilization endowed with great promise 
has gone down to death and oblivion because the Iron 
Rule did not work. Let the Golden Rule have a trial. 
We seek in vain for a nation or a race that has gone 
down and out from too much goodness or because it 
was "unprepared" for war, because it was not listed 
in the "Security League," in whose ranks this after- 
noon some local preachers are trying to marshal the 
followers of the meek and lowly Nazarite here in 
Chicago to carry aloft, not the Cross of Christ, the 
Prince of Peace, but the banner of national conceit 
under which they are to go forth to demand more 
powerful guns, more deadly ships of destruction, more 
innocent men to kill and to be killed. Surely, Tolstoy 

110 



WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



was ahead of his time, but not ahead of Jesus, of Soc- 
rates, of Buddha, or the many wise ones who have 
been loved throughout the ages and honored in life 
and in death. 

It was Russia that gave us this great Renunciant, 
who devoted his genius to promoting the simple gospel 
of the Golden Rule. Of course, to think of Tolstoy 
is to think of Pushkin, who is said to be the founder 
of modern Russian literature, of Tolstoy's elder 
brother Tourgenieff, a consumate artist who must 
needs spend his life abroad while he poured his heart 
of love for Russia, for the world, into those deathless 
"Poems in Prose,' ' it is to think of Verestchagin, 
whom many of us learned to love in person and upon 
whose message we hung with nervous intensity. Some 
of you will remember those revealing pictures twice 
exhibited in Chicago, of which he spoke to us from 
our platform across the way in the old building. So 
devoted, so heroic was he in his ministry that he went 
down to death with the ill-fated Russian battleship 
on which he had taken passage in order that he might 
better interpret with his brush the horrors of war. 
All these belong to Russia. 

Oh, I remember the wicked "pograms" — the 
slaughter of the Jews. I remember Siberia and its 
grimness. I know the story of Kiev and the horror in 
which we hold the Nihilists; but let us be glad that 
there is at least one country that develops citizens 
with courage and fortitude enough to suffer for the 
truth's sake and die for others on the highlands of 
martyrdom rather than live on the lowlands of selfish 
prosperity. Sometime, when the whole story of that 
vast territory is told, Siberia, the grim land of ice 

ill 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

and snow, will win the admiration and sympathy of 
the generations to come for the fortitude there dis- 
played. If Russia, with its crude and imperial autoc- 
racy, exiled her noblest to Siberia, let us not forget 
that Russia furnished the material worthy to be exiled 
in that way, and for that I love her. 

Our inherited estimate of Russia is indicated by the 
word "slavery." Those who shaped the English lan- 
guage for us assumed that the people away off there 
in the northeast regions of Europe were doomed to be 
forever the "hewers of wood and drawers of water," 
predestined to be servants of the "superior" races. 
And so we called all servile laborers "slaves." 

The Russians have ever been men of toil. Eighty 
per cent of that vast population still are soil workers, 
toilers in the fields, while even in our boasted agricul- 
tural United States only 53 per cent of our popula- 
tion are engaged in agricultural pursuits. Notwith- 
standing our boasted agricultural resources, Russia, 
in the year 1913, provided one-quarter of the bread- 
stuffs of the earth. That year its wheat exceeded 
the American output by two million bushels. 

To go back again to Tolstoy. He said that human- 
ity was bound by three terrible bondages which can- 
not be broken by individuals but must be broken by 
corporate means, by governments. 

One of these bondages from which the world is now 
suffering is the bondage of the sword, the horrible 
burden of war, the curse of Europe and the menace 
of America. 

Another is the bondage of the land, the giving of 
increasingl}' large sections of the universal domain 
into the exclusive control and ownership of a few. 

112 



WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



This is the burden of Europe, the blight of England, 
the menace of the United States. The democratic 
England we believe in will never rise to its power 
until the immense estates occupied by "dukes," 
"lords" and "barons" are dismantled and divided. 

For this reason Tolstoy hailed from afar the writ- 
ings of Henry George, the American. Without pass- 
ing on the working practicality of his scheme for the 
betterment of conditions, Henry George's great 
arraignment against landed monopoly has never been 
answered. His ethical demand appealed alike to Tol- 
stoy and to all lovers of man. 

The third heavy bondage is that of taxation, which 
of course covers the demands of government upon the 
product of human toil, a large proportion of which 
is devoted to the luxuries and sumptuous extrava- 
gances of those in power and still more to the wicked 
waste of wars real and imaginary. In the last analy- 
sis the burden of producing all our luxuries rests 
upon the shoulders of the man who toils, and ulti- 
mately upon the man who toils in the fields. 

There remains still to be studied the most timely 
lesson in the gospel of Tolstoy and the contributions 
of Eussia, — the lesson of Moscow and the Napoleonic 
invasion. Napoleon, that proud relic af antiquity, 
belated in time, thought to subdue Europe by the 
power of his sword. He marched half a million men 
into Russia. When, near the end of the great journey, 
he caught sight of the gracious city of Moscow, with 
its five hundred church domes, he waved his hand 
across the horizon line and said to his army, "All this 
is yours," and they entered. He expected a delega- 
tion of the city authorities to surrender the city 

113 



LOVE FOE THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

officially into his power. He was prepared to offer 
magnificent generosity to a fallen foe ; but instead of 
a great surrendering army he found only a crippled 
few, the helpless and the indigent. Russia's capital 
had been vacated, and in a few hours, at a given sig- 
nal, incendiary fires broke out in all parts of the city. 
Great, proud Moscow became a wasted city. Fire 
had defeated the sword. The disappointed army, 
humiliated and chagrined, broke forth into pillage, 
turmoil and ravishings unparalleled. For several 
weeks the humiliated Napoleon haunted the ashes, 
camped amid the cinders, and there was nobody to 
fight, nobody from whom to demand a surrender. 
Then he turned about and started on that piteous 
march, fighting only the distances, the sleet and the 
frost, and escaping with only forty thousand men 
out of the half million with whom he had set forth. 
The rest were murdered by false logic, wrecked by 
ambition and the tactical assumption that a great 
country like Russia could be conquered or divided by 
an invading army, however great or triumphant in 
battle. I take it there is a lesson in Napoleon 's march 
from Moscow that ought to be read and applied by 
the "Safety League" now trying to scare the pacific 
citizen of the United States into militancy. 

Listen to the words of Lincoln on the "Danger of 
Foreign Invasion, ' ' spoken when he was only twenty- 
eight years of age, before the Young Men's Lyceum of 
Springfield, 111., away back there in 1837: 

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step 
across the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the 
armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the 
treasures of the earth (our own excepted) in their military 

114 



WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by 
force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the 
Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. 

This is as good strategy as it is statesmanship. The 
great stretches of our republic will remain free so 
long as its people are intelligent and loyal, diligent 
and saving. No outside foe can ever denude this 
country, however much they may wish to storm our 
shores with shells or sink our battleships. Nations do 
not die from invasion, they die from internal rotten- 
ness. Lincoln was right when he said in the same 
speech, "If our republic ever dies, it will die from 
suicide, from degeneracy." 

Many nations have indeed lost their political exist- 
ence, but so far as they have been noble they have 
been planted deeper in the economy of civilization. 
Listen as I call the roll of the submerged nations: 
Judea, Greece, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Ireland, 
Wales, Scotland. All of them have been l ' conquered. ' ' 
All of them have been "dismantled," all of them 
have been "wiped off the map." But all of them have 
survived nobly in the arts, the sciences, and, above 
all, in the literature and the songs of the world. They 
have all remained, even as political forces in the 
world, for the powers that conquered them have fre- 
quently been forced to turn around and give into 
their hands the positions requiring administrative 
and creative ability. The grandson of Kossuth, the 
defeated Hungarian, was President of the Austro- 
Hungarian Senate for several years. And you know 
where the Irish, Scotch and Welsh stand in the coun- 
cils of Great Britain as well as in the affections of 
the world. 

115 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

Let the lesson of Moscow be taken to heart. Per- 
haps the greatest church in Russia in point of attrac- 
tiveness and cost is the Church of the Savior in Mos- 
cow, built to commemorate the triumph over Napo- 
leon. It is said to have cost forty million dollars and 
its gilded dome took $1,200,000 worth of gold bullion 
to cover it. But this does not best indicate the tri- 
umph of Moscow, this magnificient building does not 
most adequately celebrate the unmilitary conquest. 
Rather does Tolstoy's matchless story of " Peace and 
War" do this, — the greatest novel ever written after 
"Les Miserables, ' ' if indeed it is not entitled to equal 
rank with the great French masterpiece. 

In closing may I relate one of the stories that indi- 
cate the spirit of Russia. You remember the Tol- 
stoy story of the peasant who had profited by dealing 
in real estate and made a great deal of money. He 
heard that to the westward land was sold very cheap. 
He determined to move and buy more land. There 
he found that land was not sold by the acre but by 
the day. For a certain sum of money he would re- 
ceive all the land he could travel around in a day. 
He started out at sunrise and was permitted to travel 
until sunset. He carried bread and a flask of water 
suspended from his neck that he might lose no time. 
He started out briskly and, seeing more land that he 
wanted, he again and again quickened his pace. 
Finally he saw that he had gone as far as he dared, 
and he started back. He was tired, his strength was 
giving way, he stumbled and rose again, he kept run- 
ning and falling. The sun was just dropping behind 
the hill when he fell on the home stake, dead. And 
the real estate man gave the order, "Measure a space 

116 



WHY LOVE RUSSIA 



of ground three feet by seven and bury him; he has 
earned it." 

Tolstoy came honestly by his stories. The books 
tell us that even the folklore, the peasant stories of 
Russia, are not the stories of knights and lords and 
ladies, but of men of the soil, helpers of the poor. 

These tales suggest something of the tremendous 
wealth of Eussia, the Russia of Tolstoy and the Rus- 
sia of Verestchagin, the Russia of the peasant mass 
that has cherished for us such searching parables. 



117 



WEST AIVD EAST 

The naked West, of mists and shadows reared 

The little infant of the mystic East, 

And countless years and ages rolled away; 

The little infant grew to womanhood. 

Proud of her western virtues she saw not 

The beauties of her sister of the East, 

Coiled in the web of many creeds outworn ; 

But revelled in her own, and so forgot 

Her orient birth and faith that sprang from love. 

To them who higher soar and see aright, 

The world's delights and sorrows are but one, 

The mystic caverns of the Eastern Saint, 

The laughing bowers of the Western Sage; 

And in the lisping of the child they see 

Life's ecstasy, and its serenity 

In tott'ring sounds of age, with equal love; 

And oft in visions of despair they saw 

The ever-separating East and West. 

The God that gave the rose its hue gave, too, 

The odor to the lily of the East. 

"And let us weave with loving hands," they said, 

"A garland of the lily and the rose." 

At last, with Joyful hearts, they looked around. 

And saw one world, the World of East and West 

Enfolded in each other's loving arms! 

"One fatherhood, the fatherhood of God, 

One brotherhood, the brotherhood of Man, 

One creed, the creed of Love and Righteousness." 

— T. Rama Krishna (Madras, India) 

Read at the Races Congress, London, 1905. 



119 



VII. 

Why Love Turkey 

Turkey challenges our admiration as does anything 
vast, mysterious, inscrutable, and whatever challenges 
the admiration moves the heart, quickens it with love. 
I love Turkey as I love the Muir Woods, — the mystic 
forest that nestles at the foot of Tamalpais, out there 
b}' the Golden Gate. I penetrated that forest but a 
little way ; I felt its sombre shadows but for an hour. 
The paths that lead out from the rustic road are soon 
lost in the depths. I could not count its trees. I did 
not measure its area; I was not able to calculate its 
antiquity. Those ancient trees overwhelmed my 
imagination, but they appealed to it profoundly, and 
ever since my visit they have thrown athwart my life 
thrilling, quickening and inspiring shadows. Just so 
does this vast, weird, and, to me, unexplored and 
inexplicable country we call Turkey, affect me. There 
is something profoundly significant in the story of 
this people, whom we first discover away back there in 
the fourth or fifth century emerging from the dim far 
East, a people made brave by tyranny, a band of fugi- 
tive slaves faring westward. About the middle of 
the fifteen century, inspired by a great, new 
faith, made coherent by humble adoration, and led, 
as they thought, by a prophet of God, they took pos- 
session of the capital city of the Christian world and 
established a vast empire into whose crudities was 
poured the highest learning of the age. These people 
are still the conservators and administrators of much 

121 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

of the wealth of antiquity. Into their hands, for 
good or ill, Providence has entrusted vast treasures 
of the lost ancient world. Much of their territory 
has now become the hunting-ground of scholars. 
Whatever lies beneath the sands where Assyria once 
flourished and where Babylon, Tyre and Memphis 
once stood, the great wealth of that buried world is 
now in the custody of the Turks. The Turkish Em- 
pire appeals to us at least geographically and his- 
torically. 

Into the now disputed Dardanelles, Xerxes pene- 
trated four hundred and eighty years before Jesus 
was born. Three hundred and thirty-four years 
B. C. Alexander passed through the same waters 
with his invading army, and more than twenty- 
one hundred years after that, in 1807, the British 
fleet forced its way through. Eighty-four years after 
that, in 1891, the Russian pact was enacted, and now 
the Dardanelles is the object of grim dispute between 
two factions of the western world, one represented 
by the Allies and the other by another western power 
that loves the Turks no more than do the Allies, and 
would fain trample upon their inheritance and dev- 
astate their traditions in the interest of a weal in 
which they are not concerned. 

Geographically, Turkey throws its boundary lines 
into three great continents of the world. Europe, 
Asia and Africa all pay their tribute to the power at 
Constantinople. Turkey represents an area of 
1,600,000 square miles and an uncounted population 
estimated at over 41,000,000. Its capital city, said by 
those who have been there to be the "wonder of won- 
ders' ' among all cities, has a population of 1,200,000. 

122 



WHY LOVE TUKKEY 



A modern writer repeats the old sentence, "See Rome 
and die!" but adds, "No, by no means; not until you 
have seen Constantinople, which makes Rome seem 
simple and plain.' ' Damascus and Smyrna, mere 
names to us, catch-words in the telegraphic dispatches, 
names that perchance provoke our contempt, represent 
more than 220,000 inhabitants each. There are four 
other cities within the Turkish boundaries having a 
population of over 120,000 each, and six cities of 
50,000 each. These figures at least command our 
thoughtfulness and challenge our reverence. 

The great seas which pique our curiosity and 
quicken our imagination, — the Aegean, the Black, the 
Caspian, and the Sea of Azov, — lie before us as we 
undertake to measure the mystic Turkey, even sug- 
gestively and briefly. The great rivers of antiquity, — 
the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Jordan, — roll 
through Turkey. Whatever is rich and beautiful in 
the art-encrusted territory from the Aegean to the 
Black Sea is, now at least, in the custody of Turkey. 
St. Sophia, which architects dare praise even above 
St. Peter's for architectural impressiveness, was onee 
the proud cathedral of Constantine, who raised the 
Cross above it. It has been conserved and reconse- 
crated to Mohammedanism without defacement, and 
at this very time exerts an august power over the 
imagination of the intelligent. 

Turkey is one thing, Mohammedanism is another, 
but they cannot be separated. Whatever potentiality 
came into Turkey, already peopled by that band, 
half Mongol and half Semite, bearing a name sup- 
posed to be Chinese in its origin, and signifying a 
"helmet," came through the inspiration of the latest of 

123 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

the great religious teachers of the world. Mohammed. 
He represents the religion which it is most difficult for 
us to appreciate because it is so nearly allied to our 
own. It is harder for us to present an open mind to 
Mohammedanism than to any other of the great reli- 
gions of the world, because it is so nearly of our own 
household. Mohammedanism is the daughter of Juda- 
ism and the sister of Christianity, and it united with 
Christianity, as well as with the crude polytheism of 
Arabia, to re-emphasize the fundamental truths of 
the religion we profess. It is a vast monotheism, a 
severe Puritanism, simple in its ritual, effective in its 
piety, a religion committed to learning as it is com- 
mitted to the humanities. 

"Seek knowledge even if it were to be found in 
China,' ' said Mohammed! It is permitted Moslems 
to possess all science,' ' again said the great prophet 
of Arabia. "My son, be thou the protector of the 
faith and the sciences,' ' were the last words of Otto- 
man I., whose successors in the fifteenth century 
took possession of Constantinople and established a 
line which, through some thirty rulers, has held 
dominion over this weird territory down to the pres- 
ent day. The books tell us that four of the seven 
ministers of Mohammed II. were poets, and we know 
that during the Middle Ages the Mohammedans, 
the aggressive element of the people we now call 
Turks, simultaneously with the Moors, brought 
arithmetic, algebra, astronomy and chemistry into 
Europe, Asia and Africa, and the very characters 
which we call "Arabic figures" were the gift of Mo- 
hammedanism to the Western world. Says Emman- 
uel Deutsch, a high authority on Mohammedanism: 

124 



WHY LOVE TURKEY 



By the aid of the Koran the Arabs conquered a world 
greater than that of Alexander the Great, greater than that 
of Rome, and in as many tens of years as the latter had 
wanted hundreds to accomplish her conquests; by the aid of 
which they, alone of all the Shemites, came to Europe as 
kings, whither the Phoenicians had come as tradesmen, and 
the Jews as fugitives or captives. They came to Europe to 
hold up, together with these fugitives, the light to Human- 
ity — they alone, while darkness lay around; to raise up the 
wisdom and knowledge of Hellas from the dead, to teach 
philosophy, medicine, astronomy and the golden art of song 
to the West as well as to the East, to stand at the cradle of 
modern science, and to cause us late epigoni forever to weep 
over the day when Granada fell. 

Says Draper in his history : 

In less than a century after the death of Mohammed, the 
Iliad, the Odyssey and philosophic authors had been trans- 
lated into Arabic. Schools of medicine, law and astronomy 
were started in Bagdad, and during the ninth century, when 
Christian Europe was dull and stupid with its superstition 
and ignorance, the Moslem kingdom was busy in collecting 
great libraries, establishing schools in connection with every 
mosque, originating the systematic study of the natural sci- 
ences, particularly geometry, algebra, optics and chemistry. 
The great library at Cairo contained one hundred thousand 
transcribed volumes, six thousand five hundred on medi- 
cine and astronomy alone. The Saracen Empire was dotted 
with colleges. In these times, and by these people, clocks 
were invented; nitric acid, sulphuric acid and alcohol were 
discovered. In agriculture they were devoting themselves to 
problems of irrigation, manuring and the improvement of 
their breeds of cattle. The culture of rice, sugar and coffee 
was introduced by them, and the manufacture of silk, 
leather, paper and book-binding encouraged. 

Whatever belonged to the Saracen and Moslem 

125 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE TORN PEOPLES 

world in the Middle Ages comes into the inheritance 
of the Turk. They hold today in trust the tradition 
of that power that once came near, very near, judging 
from the human standpoint, to possessing Europe 
and supplanting Christianity. That power is still 
too vital for us, in our prejudices and our hatreds, to 
understand. 

In 1903, the year which furnished the latest figures 
within reach, five thousand hand-looms and ten thou- 
sand workmen were busy in Damascus alone, weaving 
silks and rugs for the western markets. Fisheries in 
the Bosphorus were reported to have yielded that year 
an aggregate of $1,300,000 worth of mother-of-pearl 
and amber. In 1903 Turkey in Europe, which is the 
lesser part of Turkey, exported to the United States 
two and a quarter million dollars' worth of rugs and 
carpets, nearly a million dollars' worth of tobacco, 
a million's worth of goat skins, another million's 
worth of wood, cotton, sugar, gum, arabic, licorice, 
opium, figs and dates. The total imports into the 
United States from Turkey in Europe that year 
amounted to twenty-one and a quarter million dollars, 
while our exports to them during the same year were 
only about one and a quarter millions. 

We think of Turkey as benighted and dark. It is 
and has been fertile ground for missionaries from the 
West. The story of Eoberts College, Constantinople, 
is one of the bright stories of American missionary 
achievements. The Presbyterians have their college 
at Beirut, supported by Turkish money and dedicated 
to various beliefs. In 1910 there were ten colleges 
and forty high schools, all in charge of Americans. 

126 



WHY LOVE TURKEY 



Nearly 37,000 schools throughout the empire, with 
1,331,200 pupils, were reported in 1900. 

In Turkey, then, we have a human "Muir Woods," 
a grove of semper-virens, of never-dying redwood 
trees, reaching up and up into the blue of God, reach- 
ing down and down into the subsoil of history. Theirs 
is a spiritual botany unlike that of our own proud ash, 
elm and oak, and only remotely related to our pine 
and hemlock, but there they are, like the denizens of 
the Muir Woods, which can grow only in the humid 
atmosphere of the Pacific Slope. But I hold that 
there must be something lovable in a thing so vast 
and powerful. At least our own sentiment must be 
held humbly subject to revision in the presence of so 
gigantic a manifestation of humanity, about which 
we are in such profound and oftentimes criminal 
ignorance because we refuse to follow the open paths 
that lie before us. 

Even in so limited a library as mine I have at times 
almost lost sight of my sermon while allowing myself 
to roam among the interesting paths of reading which 
reach down and back and deep into Turkish, Saracen 
and Ottoman traditions. The last charming book that 
has reached my hand is the work of an American 
writer, Henry Otis Dwight, and is entitled "Con- 
stantinople, Old and New." This book warms my 
heart with love and admiration for the beauty it 
reveals. Mr. Dwight describes what he considers the 
most remarkable room in Constantinople. It was 
called "The Chamber of the Noble Kobe," and was 
built to contain the robe which one of the early Mo- 
hammeds threw over the shoulders of a poet who said, 
in his presence, "The prophet is a sword drawn from 

127 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

the scabbard of God." This saying so pleased the 
Caliph that he threw his own mantle around the poet, 
and the incident so appealed to the Oriental spirit of 
that people that the robe became endowed with mirac- 
ulous power. The tradition grew rapidly, and now 
every year during the moon month of Ramazan, one 
of the sacred ceremonies is the kissing of this robe and 
securing thereby the power to heal diseases and bring 
other miraculous blessings. This brings us face to face 
with the insight of the Turkish people, in the generous 
appreciation, the spiritual sensibility that recognizes 
the function of the poet as a "flaming sword of the 
Almighty." This is a figure that would please Marti- 
neau, fascinate Emerson, and delight Walt Whitman. 
We smile at the story that after each kissing the robe 
is wiped with a delicate handkerchief which is then 
washed in a bowl of water, and the water, thus quick- 
ened, becomes charged with healing power. We are 
amused at the fancy and dismiss the stories as "clear 
superstition. " But right alongside of these stories rise 
the equally attractive traditions of Saint Bridget and 
Saint Patrick and the numerous other saints that have 
healed by their shadows and blessed humanity by their 
miraculous touch. The tradition of the "Room of the 
Noble Robe" is not more superstitious or less charm- 
ing than is that of the gift of Saint Bridget, which 
enabled the washerwoman to hang her clothes on a 
sunbeam and thus do without the missing clothes line. 
All of these stories represent the hunger of the hu- 
man heart, the inexplicable pathos of the human soul 
groping toward the sanctities with benighted mind. 
They indicate a hungering for the divine without 
the help of science, the guidance of philosophy, or 

128 



WHY LOVE TURKEY 



the tuition of the trained mind. I love Turkey be- 
cause it is rich enough in the spirit to breed supersti- 
tion, for superstition is arrested reverence, thwarted 
vision, perverted longing. 

Oh, I know the bloody tales of Turkey, the terrible 
story of the Armenians. But so do I know the hor- 
rible story of Torquemada and the unspeakable cruel- 
ties to the Jews by the Christians even down to the 
present day, the wicked devastations of Christianity 
throughout Spain, the cruel torture of the noblest 
in Italy, Greece, France, Spain, and throughout 
the boundaries of Europe. What Spain was in 
the fifteenth century, Turkey may be now. Even so, 
it is not more than five hundred years behind the 
times. Russia had its "'Ivan the Terrible," who 
wrote his story in the unbelievable cruelties of 
an arbitrary monarchy. So Turkey has had its 
tyrants. These unjustifiable cruelties are the 
product not of any one race, certainly not of any one 
religion, but they arise in spite of religion. They are 
the product of absolute monarchy, the product of 
despotism, and they can be ameliorated only as 
humanity moves forward toward democracy, toward 
the recognition of the rights of every individual and 
1he sanctities of each individual soul. 

Talking with a well known professor, one in high 
standing in the University of Iowa, a week ago, I 
said, "I am groping after something admirable in 
Turkey." His face lit up, and he exclaimed, "Oh, 
I wish you could see my sister. She has been a teacher 
in Constantinople for thirty years. She is there now. 
Of course we are anxious about her, but she has fallen 
in love with the Turks. She went there as a mission- 

129 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

ary, is sustained there as a missionary, an educator, 
but she has learned to love the Turkish people, whom 
she finds so courteous, so gentle, so kind." I, in my 
conceit, — I confess it, — was tempted to smile at these 
adjectives, but what right have I to dismiss the ver- 
dict of an intelligent school teacher, coming out of 
thirty years of intimate acquaintance with the Turks ? 
In 1907, I think it was, I attended a great Interna- 
tional Congress of Liberal Religionists held in Bos- 
ton. At the banquet table I was seated next to an 
eminent Oriental scholar of Paris, one of the distin- 
guished scholars of the world. Presently he said to me, 
"When and where are we to have another Parliament 
of Religions?" I replied by repeating the opinion 
which I had ventured at the closing session of the 
Chicago Parliament, that the next great world-Parlia- 
ment would be summoned by Orientals and not by 
Occidentals, and that Christianity would be guest 
and not host. "Perhaps away out there on the banks 
of the Ganges, in the city of Benares, the Buddhists 
will invite us and we will go," I added. My neighbor 
smiled and said nothing just then, but along toward 
the end of the dinner he said, "I can't stop thinking 
about your Parliament of Religions, but I think you 
are mistaken. The next host will not be Buddhist or 
Hindu, but Mohammedan. There is a force at work in 
the Mohammedan world that is getting ready to play 
the host to a Parliament of Religions," "Well," said 
I, you make me smile ; that is the last place I would 
look for it." He answered, "That is the trouble 
with you, that is the trouble with all of us; we do 
not understand the forces that are at work in the 
Mohammedan world. The next parliament will be 

130 



WHY LOVE TURKEY 



somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean, or 
waters connected therewith. I cannot tell just where, 
but I am going home to work on it. You will hear 
from me when I get back." 

Alas, within six months of that banquet there came 
to me the tidings that the brave young scholar had 
been summoned beyond. The Congress of Eeligions 
has not been called within the territory of the "un- 
speakable Turk. " But the vision, born out of scholar- 
ship, has stayed with me and rebuked me when I was 
inclined to dismiss the Turk as I would dismiss a 
mad dog, and has frequently aroused my suspicions 
when I found wise politicians talking about "the sick 
man of the East" as though he were an easy problem, 
a negligible quantity in the future of humanity. 

When you read in Dwight's book the testimony of 
an eye-witness of that great revolution of 1908 in 
Constantinople, when at last a constitutional form of 
government was adopted, when you realize with what 
enthusiasm and love the people were moved, how 
pacific they were, how bloodless was the revolution, 
you will realize that we have yet something to learn 
from Turkey and that Turkey is the custodian not only 
of some of the great traditions of the past, the buried 
marvels of old civilizations, but that out there on the 
eastern boundaries of Christianity the bridge is to 
be built that will connect a new Asia with a new 
Europe. If adequate submarine foundations cannot 
be secured, then the towers must be built that will 
transmit wireless messages from the "practical men" 
of the West to the unrimmed pieties of the East. 
Europe has been aggressive and conceited. It has 
made poor use of the great bequest of Asia, the 

131 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

mother of religion. But somehow, somewhere, the 
Hellespont is going to be bridged. 

There is a pathos about the Turk that Lord Hough- 
ton many years ago caught sight of and put into a 
poem. He conceived of the Turk in Europe as being 
away from home, and he put into the mouth of the 
homesick man these lines: 

Men of the West ! Ye understand us not, 

We you no more : ye take our good for ill ; 

Ye scorn what we esteem man's happiest lot, — 

Perfect submission to creative will; 

Ye would rejoice to watch from us depart 

Our ancient temperance, our peace of heart. 

Let us return! If long we linger here, 
Ye will destroy us, not with open swords, 
Not with such arms as brave men must not fear, 
But with the poisoned shafts of subtle words; 
Your blank indifference for our living creed 
Would make us paltry infidels indeed. 

What can ye give us for a faith so lost? 
For love of duty, and delight in prayer? 
How are we wiser that our minds are tost 
By winds of knowledge on a sea of care ? 
How are we better that we hardly fear 
To break the laws our fathers held most dear? 

Aping your customs, we have changed e'en now 
The noble garb in nature's wisdom given, 
And turban that, on every Muslim's brow, 
Was as a crown at once for earth and heaven; — 
The sword with which the sire Byzantium won 
Sleeps in yon deep unwielded by the son. 

132 



WHY LOVE TURKEY 



Let us return ! Across the fatal strait 

Our fathers' shadows welcome us once more; 

Back to the glories of the Khalee fate, 

Back to the faith we loved, the dress we wore, 

When in one age the world could well contain 

Haroun-al-Raschid and your Charlemagne! 

I cannot believe that the solution of the Eastern 
question is Lord Houghton's solution. We cannot 
mobilize forty-one million people. We cannot kill 
them off. We cannot banish them. We must live 
with them. And, living with them, we must frater- 
nize with them, elevate them on the rising tides of 
philosophy and religion that know no dividing line 
of inheritance or of creed. 

May God help us to eliminate from our patriotism 
the conceits of today. Let the Middle Ages, that 
brought the light of science into Europe under the 
banners of the Star and Crescent, make modest the 
conceits of those who today are mobilized under the 
Cross. We need some kind of a new reading of his- 
tory — and maybe we are too dull of mind and too 
narrow of heart to discover that reading until it is 
written in blood, or to detect our error until our 
vision is washed clean by the flood of tears that are 
now blinding Europe. 



133 



TESTAMENT 

I said, "I will take my life 

And throw it away; 
I who wan fire and song 

Will turn to clay." 

"I will He no more in the night 

With shaken breath, 
I will toss my heart in the air 

To be caught by Death." 

But out of the night I heard 

Like the inland sound of the sea, 

The hushed and terrible sob 
Of all humanity. 

Then I said, "Oh, who am 1 
To scorn God to his facef 
I will bow my head and stay 
And suffer with my race." 

— Sara Teasdale 
From "Rivers to the Sea." The Macmillan Company. 



135 



VIII. 

" Above All Nations is Humanity !" 

When a generous man had laid the foundations of 
the great institution of learning at Ithaca, N. Y., 
which is now the pride of the entire country, the 
lure of academic freedom and the chance of work- 
ing with and promoting a democracy in which he 
believed brought from England one of its most 
famous scholars, Goldwin Smith. He became Cornell's 
first professor of history and, in time, one of the most 
beloved professors on the campus, a scholar respected 
throughout the nation. When the time came for him 
to retire from active duty, he left to Cornell Univer- 
sity his great library, said at the time to be the most 
valuable historic library in the country. In addition 
to this precious gift, he caused a great block of gran- 
ite to be carved into a comfortable seat whereon two 
or three persons might rest at once, and into the back 
of this monolithic bench he caused to be cut in bold 
letters the words, 

"ABOVE ALL NATIONS IS HUMANITY. " 

To find the meaning of this great motto, to discover 
the common language of this common humanity, is 
my aim in this address. 

There is a language understood by all nations, — an 
Esperanto familiar to the untrained. Everybody 
knows the language of a smile. Everbody under- 
stands the language of a tear. A kiss is very much 

137 



LOVE FOE THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

the same in all countries. Pity and kindness express 
themselves unequivocally in all lands. 

Alas, there is also a language of crime that is uni- 
versal. Hate has a common language. Wickedness 
finds expression under all flags. I have in my library 
a disagreeable book entitled " Famous Assassina- 
tions," which contains an account of twenty-five 
great historic crimes. This list runs through eleven 
countries. Greek, Roman, English, Swiss, French, 
Dutch, Russian, German, Swedish, American and 
Servian peoples have contributed to this gory list 
and have thus been initiated into the ghastly brother- 
hood of murder. Surely there is at least a brother- 
hood of wickedness and weakness that binds the world 
together. The fraternity of crime reaches around the 
globe. 

But, thank heaven, there is also a brotherhood of 
virtue, a brotherhood of grace. The great Mother 
Church of us all has its " Calendar of Saints," and 
this calendar forms a cordon of love that belts the 
globe. England has indeed its St. Augustine, but so 
has Ireland its St. Patrick, Wales its St. David, Scot- 
land its St. Columba, France its St. Martin and Ger- 
many its St. Boniface; and these are only a few 
examples of the many, many men and women of all 
climes who, by the purity of their lives, the sweetness 
of their dispositions, the devotion of their hearts, have 
become citizens of the world. 

As there is a brotherhood of virtue binding the 
world together, so there is a brotherhood of genius. 
Great souls will not stay penned up within geograph- 
ical limits. When we speak of Homer, Dante, Goethe, 
Shakespeare, and the unknown author of Job, we lose 

138 



ABOVE ALL NATIONS JS HUMANITY 

all sense of time and space. We do not need a map 
to place them. They belong to the world. When we 
call the roll of our own noblest, — Washington, Frank- 
lin, Jefferson, Emerson and Lincoln, — we dare not 
make exclusive claims to them. The world has long 
since recognized them as its own. 

As there is a brotherhood of saintliness and of 
power, so is there a brotherhood of beauty that encir- 
cles the globe. The great artists, whether they be 
those of brush or chisel or the great tone-masters of 
the world, all speak a language intelligible to all 
the world. One needs no lexicon to understand the 
Sistine Madonna. St. Peter's dome is a polyglot speak- 
ing an intelligible language to the endless diversity 
of humanity that flows like an endless river around 
the benignant and hospitable pillars below. The music 
of "America," "Nearer My God to Thee/' the "Mar- 
seillaise," adapts itself readily to metered words 
in many languages. The words are local, provincial, 
national, but the tunes are universal. They speak to 
the soul in all climes. 

One more and last count! The fundamentals of 
religion reach through all creeds, below all forms, 
and beyond all nationalities. Many names but one 
God; many rituals, but one upreaching of the soul; 
many forms of penitence and petition, but the same 
contrition and confession of the humble and devout 
souls of the faith. I have a book in my library 
entitled "A Book of Worship," compiled by an Epis- 
copalian rector, a Unitarian minister and a Jewish 
rabbi. The principle of compilation was to accept 
nothing that did not clearly appeal to each of the 
editors. They searched the sacred scriptures of many 

139 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

faiths, the prayers of the saints and sages of all ages, 
the sayings of prophets of all climes, and the result is 
a book of impressive sweetness and great directness, 
a book of simple faith, intelligible to and beloved by 
simple souls everywhere. Christian and pagan, Jew 
and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, orthodox and 
heterodox here meet at a common altar. Devoutness 
and service, love and hope, pity and trust constitute 
the ritual of universal religion. 

In view of these great insistent ties that bind each 
to each and all to the Infinite, may we not devoutly 
say with Goldwin Smith, — 

" ABOVE ALL NATIONS IS HUMANITY?" 

I have passed in review the battle-torn peoples of 
Europe. I have summoned them on Sunday morning 
and in church to appear and give reason for their 
being beloved, — to substantiate their claims upon our 
affection. We found that England, Germany, 
Prance, Italy, Russia and Turkey were all inheritors 
of a vast spiritual wealth, — that they represent a 
great company of brave men and loyal women. They 
have each conserved the traditions of consecrated 
generations, of toiling centuries. We found that all 
of these nations are more or less impressed with the 
binding quality of their trusteeship, all more or less 
conscious of the great responsibility placed upon 
them. So profoundly are they impressed with their 
obligations to the unborn that they are pouring out 
their life-blood like water in defense of this in- 
- heritance. 

But we also found that these peoples, though ear- 
nest and devout, are infatuated with the pitiful, 

140 



ABOVE ALL NATIONS IS HUMANITY 

not to say damnable, conceit that each is possessed 
of treasures peculiar and unique. All of them are 
alike touched with an arrogance based on founda- 
tions that are ever fluctuating. All are alike blinded 
with an unscientific and unphilosophic belief that 
their heritage can be preserved at the maximum only 
by keeping it inviolate and in their own possession 
on lines already established. They have assumed 
that their destiny in the future is dependent upon 
preserving the externalties of what they call their 
"civilization" and their political and military pre- 
eminence. 

The saddest thing of all is that this logic of partial- 
ity, this theory of a partial God and a "chosen peo- 
ple" lowers the standards of the nation that holds it, 
debauches its citizens, disintegrates the saving ideals 
of its prophets and sages, dissipates its dreams of 
brotherhood and its faith in fatherhood. 

This orthodoxy of nationalism is tearing the seam- 
less robe of the eternal Christ whom these nations alike 
affect to worship. The battling nations are guilty of 
a desecration from which even the Roman soldiers at 
the foot of the Cross desisted. They did not dare 
lay vandal hands on the robe that was "woven 
throughout without seam." 

It is pitiful to see these great powers lending them- 
selves to a degenerate bitterness from the inspiration 
of the belief that each is engaged in the Lord's work. 
King, Kaiser, Czar, — each has sent forth his men to 
battle with devout invocation to the Most High to 
guide them. King, Kaiser and Czar, — each believes 
his armies have gone forth to protect the destiny of 
humanity. But the springs of their inspirations are 

141 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

unreal, artificial, mutable, and because they have 
failed to realize their common humanity they are now 
devastating Europe. They have mistaken friend for 
foe, brother for enemy. 

What are we to do with these inspired — let me 
select the word carefully — "patriots" ; these mistaken 
men, in whom love of country has thwarted, if not 
strangled their love of humanity? I will not say, 
with Doctor Johnson, that "Patriotism is the last 
resort of knaves," although I am sometimes glad that 
he said it, that I may have it to quote, but I do say 
unhesitatingly, with George Eliot, that "Patriotism 
is the virtue of narrow minds." "He knows no lan- 
guage who knows but one" is the dictum of the 
schools. By the same token I say, he loves no country 
who loves but one ! 

The lines of protection, love and right, reach be- 
yond the geographical boundaries of nations, and 
when this war terminates, as some day it will, it will 
not be through the exaltation of one power and the 
humiliation of others but, through the rough discip- 
line of nature, all will be compelled to acknowledge 
more or less clearly that they have misunderstood 
and misinterpreted one another and assumed to be 
antagonistic interests which were really identical. 

The world is not partial to conquerers. History has 
been indifferent to battlefield triumphs. Destiny has 
hastened to cover with the dust of oblivion the sword- 
wielders of the world. The civilizations builded on 
force have gone down, and the boasted civilizations of 
today that would stay their tottering power with bay- 
onets and bombs are doomed by the decree of the 
Eternal, who has so ordained that love and tender- 

142 



ABOVE ALL NATIONS IS HUMANITY 

ness, fellowship and justice, righteousness and peace 
shall ultimately prevail. 

I accept the challenge of the cynic who finds in 
China a grim realization of the fate of any pacific 
nation. Yea, verily, look at " unarmed China." Her 
people have devoted themselves through the milleni- 
ums to constructive industries, and her triumphs are 
triumphs of labor. China alone among nations has 
survived the stress and storms of forty centuries. It 
has survived by virtue of its pacific character, and, if 
it is not debauched by the militancy of the western 
world, it will continue until, out of the sweat of 
honest toil, it evolves a republic that China is not yet 
prepared for, a democracy not yet realized. 

May God help us to eliminate from our patriotism 
the conceits of today, to purge our democracy of the 
cowardice that would revert to the protection of in- 
creased armament, multiplied battleships, and the 
safeguard of bomb-making and bomb-throwing. 

Perhaps the most searching poem of the war, thus 
far, is the one entitled "Five Souls," written by 
an obscure bank clerk heretofore unknown in the 
realm of letters. In this poem the spirits of a Pole, 
an Austrian, a Tyrolese, a Frenchman, a native of 
Lorraine, and a Scotchman, having been torn from 
their bodies on battlefields, breathe each to each the 
same refrain : 

I gave my life for freedom — this I know: 
For those who bade me fight had told me so. 

The Fuller Sisters of England, now traveling in 
America, have adapted these lines to an impressive 
musical movement from Beethoven. In a quiet mid- 
night hour after listening to the song there came to 

143 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

ine an additional stanza, a chorus of the "Five Souls" 
touched by the higher knowledge which has reached 
them "in the house not made with hands, eternal in 
the heavens." 

On God's eternal hills we now do mourn 

Our broken homes, with wives and children dear. 
That we were brothers then, as now, 'tis clear, 

For war is hate and leaves the world forlorn. 
We lost our lives through error, now we know: 
For love supernal, it doth teach us so. 



144 



"SCUM O* THE EARTH" 

I. 
At the sate of the West I stand, 
On the isle where the nations throng. 
We call them "scum o' the earth"; 

Stay, are we doing you wrong, 

Young fellow from Socrates' land?— 

You, like a Hermes so lissome and strong 

Fresh from the Master Praxiteles' hand? 

So you're of Spartan birth? 

Descended, perhaps, from one of the band— • 

Deathless in story and song— 

Who combed their long hair at Thermopylae* pass? . . 

Ah, I forget the straits, alas! 

More tragic than theirs, more compassion-worth* 

That have doomed you to march in our "immigrant class" 

Where you're nothing but "scum o' the earth." 

II. 
You Pole with the child on your knee, 
What dower bring you to the land of the free? 
Hark! does she croon 
That sad little tune 

That Chopin once found on his Polish lea 
And mounted in gold for you and for me? 
Now a ragged young fiddler answers 
In wild Czech melody, 

That Dvorak took whole from the dancers. 
And the heavy faces bloom 
In the wonderful Slavic way; 
The little, dull eyes, the brows a-gloom, 
Suddenly dawn like the day. 

While, watching these folk and their mystery, 
I forget that they're nothing worth; 
That Bohemians, Slovaks, Croatians, 
And men of all Slavic nations 
Are "polacks" — and "scum o' the earth." 

III. 
Genoese boy of the level brow, 
Lad of the lustrous, dreamy eyes 
A-stare at Manhattan's pinnacles now 

145 



In the first sweet Nlioek of a hushed surprise; 

Within your far-rapt seer's eyes 

I catch the glow of the wild surmise 

That played on the Santa Maria's prow 

In that still gray dawn, 

Four centuries gone, 

When a world from the wave began to rise. 

oh, it's hard to foretell what high emprise 

Is the goal that gleams 

When Italy's dreams 

Spread wing and sweep into the skies. 

Caesar dreamed him a world ruled well; 

Dante dreamed Heaven out of Hell; 

Angelo brought us there to dwell; 

And you, are you of a different birth?— 

You're only a "dago,"— and "scum o' the earth"! 

IV. 

Stay, are we doing you wrong 

Calling you "scum o' the earth," 

Man of the sorrow-bowed head, 

Of the features tender yet strong,— 

Man of the eyes full of wisdom and mystery 

Mingled with patience and dread t 

Have not I known you in history, 

Sorrow-bowed head? 

Were you the poet-king, worth 

Treasures of Ophir unpriced? 

Were you the prophet, perchance, whose art 

Foretold how the rabble would mock 

That shepherd of spirits, ere long, 

Who should carry the lambs on his heart 

And tenderly feed his flock? 

Man — lift that sorrow-bowed head. 

Lo! 'tis the face of the Christ! 

The vision dies at its birth. 
You're merely a butt for our mirth. 
You're a "sheeny" — and therefore despised 
And rejected as "scum o' the earth." 



Countrymen, bend and invoke 

Mercy for us blasphemers, 

For that we spat on these marvelous folk. 



146 



.Nations oi tlnrers and dreamers, 

Scions of singers and seers. 

Our peers, and more than our peers. 

"Rabble and refuse," ire name them 

And "scum o' the earth," to shame them. 

Mercy for us of the few, young' years. 

Of the culture so callow and crude. 

Of the hands so grasping and rude. 

The lips so ready for sneers 

At the sons of our ancient more-thnn-peer*. 

Mercy for us who dare despise 

Men in whose loins our Homer lies; 

Mothers of men who shall bring? to us 

The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss; 

Children in whose frail arms shall rest 

Prophets and singers and saints of the West. 

Newcomers all from the eastern seas, 

Help us incarnate dreams like these. 

Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong. 

Help us to father a nation, strong 

in the comradeship of an equal birth, 

in the wealth of the richest bloods of earth. 

— Robert Haven Schauftler 
From "Scum o' the Earth." Houghton Mijjtin Company. 



147 



IX. 

(^America's Opportunity 

By blue Ontario's shore, 

As I mused of these warlike days, and of peace returned, 
and the dead that return no more, 

A Phantom, gigantic, superb, with stern visage accosted me, 

Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of 
America, chant me the carol of victory 

And strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more pow- 
erful yet, 

And sing me before you go the song of the throes of 

democracy. 

***** 

These states are the amplest poem, 

Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming Nation of 
nations, 

Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast 
doings of the day and night, 

Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of par- 
ticulars, 

Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, 
the soul loves, 

Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, 

the soul loves. 

***** 

Of all races and eras the States with veins full of poetical 
stuff most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and 
use them the greatest, 

Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much 
as their poets shall. 

Thus sang Walt Whitman the year after our great 
war. 

149 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

Who shall adequately state America's opportunity? 
Who shall interpret its responsibility"? Who shall 
measure the burden that rests upon its shoulders at 
this time? 

We have counted the lovable qualities in the battle- 
torn peoples of Europe. We have called the roll of 
the blood-stained nations and tried to interpret them 
in terms of sympathy and pity. Behind the bristling 
trenches, beyond the combative, bebuttoned, belaced 
and sword-girt generals, we hear the cry of children 
and the sobs of women. We see that behind the bat- 
1 le lines lie the depleted fields of Europe, waiting 
for the husbandman's plowshare, the gardener's 
vigilance, the benedictions of labor. 

May I, in conclusion, try to tell, not "Why love 
America " — the title would be accusing, — but what I 
see as America's great opportunity? 

In the first place it is America's opportunity to 
justify its great history ; to prove worthy of its mag- 
nificent inheritance; to prevent the names of the 
brave pioneers, not only of America, but of progress 
in every clime and time from being forgotten, the pio- 
neer discoverers not only of lands and mountains and 
prairies, but of the human heart. America must not 
allow humanity to forget the name of Roger Williams, 
who, two hundred and eighty years ago, was exiled 
from our own boastful Boston to face in mid-winter 
the dangers from a savage people and an unexplored 
country. For fourteen weeks, as he himself records, 
he "knew not the sight of bread or bed." And all this 
that he might lay the foundations of the first city or 
colony to be known in history as constitutionally com- 
mitted to religions freedom. 

150 



AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



It is not for America to forget the name of Thomas 
Jefferson and his magnificent bequest, the man who 
wished that upon his tombstone might be recorded 
three great counts and no more, counts that have 
rendered all our succeeding history potent and made 
his tomb a shrine toward which liberty-lovers in all 
nations may well turn reverent feet. He was the 
author of the Declaration of Independence, compiler 
of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and 
founder of the University of Virginia. These great 
counts lie at the feet of the America of today an 
unmeasured responsibility. The Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the Emancipation Proclamation consti- 
tute America 's two great undying contributions to the 
liberty of humanity, two unparalleled documents in 
the literature of human progress. 

The last words of the great Jefferson, the most 
intelligent, accomplished and keen-sighted scholar 
that ever sat in the President's chair were: "Tell the 
committee to be on the alert! Tell the committee to 
be on the alert !" Then the lips were closed forever. 
The last moment of the great mind was burdened,, 
not with any petty anxiety about his own soul or 
selfish concern for his own future, but, true to the 
inspirations of a thoughtful life, he was apprehensive 
for democracy. Again he was President or cabinet 
officer, anxious for the "committee to be on the alert." 
Fifty years to the day after the signing of the great 
document, on the great anniversary day of our nation, 
the Fourth of July, Thomas Jefferson ceased to wield 
that splendid power all dedicated to democracy. His 
was a power perhaps more profound and more intel- 
lectual than that of any other man of his time, and, 

151 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

with perhaps one or two exceptions, than that of any 
man since his time. 

On the same day John Adams his predecessor by 
a few hours into the Great Beyond, died, leaving us 
a similar heritage. Friends, we are members of the 
committee that disturbed the dying moments of 
Thomas Jefferson, and his message rings today in the 
conscience chamber of your soul and mine, urging us 
to be on the alert, — about what? We are not left to 
guess. On the alert in that cause which he did so 
much to forward, the equality of men, the freedom of 
all minds, the consecration of a throneless nation to 
the paths of peace and the cause of humanity. This 
splendid inheritance entrusted to us is enriched, oh. 
how greatly enriched, by the brave and the loyal of 
all the years that have followed. 

Would you know the responsibility of America, the 
opportunity of this nation today, call the roll of its 
loving and loyal founders and leaders. I mention a 
few names without attempting any classification, 
chronological or otherwise. 

See the demure Quaker mother, Lucretia Mott, sit- 
ting in the dingy court room where an escaped slave 
is being tried. The Government officer asked the 
judge to remove her from the room, because, he said, 
in her presence he could not press his case as became 
his duty, hampered as he was by the radiant face of 
the Quaker, pledged to no weapons but those of truth. 

Let us enter the study of William Ellery Channing, 
where the first Peace Society in America was organ- 
ized. Let us catch this one sentence from the liquid 
flow of that prophet's lips: " The sense of duty is the 
greatest gift of God!' 

152 



AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



Elizabeth Cady Stanton, when the beloved brother, 
ten or twelve years her senior, passed out of the life 
of her accomplished father, threw herself into the 
father's arms to hear him say, "Oh, my daughter, I 
wish you were a boy ! " While the dead brother was 
yet unburied she sought the old Scotch dominie, who 
had received his culture in the University of Glasgow, 
and asked him if he would teach her Greek. The old 
dominie dropped his hoe in the garden, brought out 
the dusty Greek grammar, and gave her the first 
lesson then and there! Thus in her determination to 
fill, as far as lay in her power, the vacant place of the 
dead brother, she climbed not only into the confidence 
of her father, but into the confidence of her age. 
Woman as she was she stood sponsor for the Thomas 
Jefferson idea to its ultimate limit, which ignored sex 
as well as sect lines, and gave to democracy a 
new emphasis. 

Julia Ward Howe was not so modern, not so up-to- 
date that she could afford to sever the connection 
between her thought and work and the organized 
institutions of religion. She never saw the time, with 
all her culture, that she could dispense with the con- 
solations, the inspirations and the guidance of th^ 
church. And so, with the co-operation of her be- 
loved pastor, James Freeman Clarke, and that of 
their mutual friend, Phillips Brooks, she framed a 
"proclamation," an "appeal," or an "address," to the 
women of Europe, especially to the women in the 
households of the crowned, begging for their co-opera- 
tion in establishing a movement that would bring 
about pacific relations between nations and make 
horrible war a thing of the past. The response to that 

153 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

appeal, as she herslf said, was chilly, and so two 
years later, in 1872, she started single-handed and 
alone on the first peace pilgrimage in history, with 
exactly the same message and exactly the same pur- 
pose as that which inspired the more conspicuous and 
unfortunately more advertised "Ford Peace Expedi- 
tion." Her message was translated into all the 
modern European tongues, and she carried her pil- 
grimage, so far as possible, into the royal chambers of 
Europe. But feeling that the time was not ripe, she 
came back to establish the institution of Mothers' 
Sunday, that annually there might be a rallying in the 
interest of the liberty for which the United States 
stands, and that the peace which lay deep in the heart 
of Thomas Jefferson might be perpetuated. 

Charles Sumner ! In 1845, on the 4th day of July, 
this gifted son of the republic delivered, in Boston, 
perhaps the most superb and far-reaching oration in 
American literature, still a great classic in the library 
of the thoughtful, on " The True Grandeur of Nations." 
Pointing to what was then the most modern and up- 
to-date battleship of the United States, lying in the 
outer harbor and wearing the proud name of "Ohio," 
he told his auditors that the money invested in that 
one battleship would build four Harvard Universities, 
with all the buildings necessary, and equip them with 
libraries and professors. He also declared that the 
"true grandeur of nations" lay not in their battle- 
ships nor in their cannons, nor yet in their armament, 
but in these three great counts which are as vital and 
potent today as then; the integrity of their citizens, 
the nobility of their institutions and the intelligence 
of their voters. 

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AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



Charles Sumner, like all true citizens, believed in 
the right kind of preparedness. The opportunity of 
our republic today is not preparation for the war that 
may never come, but the preparedness which Sumner 
promoted and which is now the bulwark of this na- 
tion's safety, a preparedness which lies not in our 
cannon or our powder magazines, but in the develop- 
ment of our resources, the honor of our administra- 
tion. For, to nations as to individuals, protection 
lies in " honest thought" and " simple truth," — these 
constitute our highest defense. 

We hear much of the inadequacy of citizen-soldiers, 
the unreliability of volunteer service. If the history 
of the United States proves anything, it proves that 
a standing army is, even in time of war, the least of 
our defenses. I know whereof I speak. During the 
Civil War I was brigaded for three years with one 
regular battery and three or four volunteer batteries, 
and I speak only the cold testimony of history when 
I say that the regular battery was the less trusted, the 
one not put forward in serious emergencies. The 
big standing army that the United States is now beg- 
ging for cannot be created at present, even if it were 
so ordered by Congress, because there are not enough 
weak, cheap, unreliable, uncertain young men to make 
up such an army, and the good young men, the brave 
young men, are not going to lend themselves to the 
indolence of camp in times of peace. There are not 
"Tommy Atkinses" enough in the United States to 
make up an army of 400,000. One of our most skilful 
interpreters of war, a correspondent sent abroad to 
report for our papers, has called attention to the 
significant fact that the surpassing deeds of heroism, 

155 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

the splendid achievements under fire which have 
cheapened the "Charge of the Light Brigade" and 
"Pickett's Charge" at Gettysburg, were accomplished 
by no regulars, either of France or England, but by a 
brigade of lumberjacks from the backwoods of Can- 
ada, raised in the most unmilitary surroundings and 
rushed to the front with the minumum of training. 
They were men inured to hardship, trained to self- 
reliance, and they made invincible soldiers. 

Fritz Kreisler, in his "Four Weeks in the Trenches," 
which I regard as the most human document yet pro- 
duced by the war, so far as I know, testifies to the fact 
that, out of his fifty men, it was the scholars, the pro- 
fessors, who endured the most and dared the most, 
though he had also the other kind, trained soldiers 
that were supposed to be. the bulwark of the nation. 

So the strength of the nation today lies, first, in the 
integrity of its citizens; next, in the nobility of its 
institutions, and last in the intelligence of its voters. 
So said Charles Sumner in 1845. So it needs to be 
said today, lest we fall back on the outgrown tradi- 
tions of monarchy and try to entrench ourselves 
behind the efficiency of armor, of steel and powder, of 
cannon and battleship. When under the excitemeht 
of our Civil War, at a time when the relations between 
the United States and England were most strained, 
an indignity offered to our government justified the 
United States, as we all thought at that time, in 
taking from an English ship our traitorous citizens, 
Mason and Slidell, and the clamor of the press and 
the pressure of the army and navy were all toward 
violence, then it was that Charles Sumner, that great 
apostle of democracy, stood up in the Senate of the 

156 



AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



United States and said, "Gentlemen, we are in the 
wrong. England is right. Those men must be released." 
Here was a cause of friction that would undoubtedly 
have precipitated us into war had we not been fortu- 
nate enough to have a Charles Sumner as chairman 
of the committee on military affairs. But long after- 
wards a decision was rendered which by many was 
thought unfair to our country, but there was courage 
and heroism enough in the administration of the 
United States to accept the decision in the now famous 
Alabama case, as handed down from the highest court. 
We received it as the law. We were saved because 
the administration was influenced by such prophetic 
souls as Charles Sumner, who knew that no destruc- 
tion of human life, no slaughter of the innocents, 
would bring greater justice. With his last conscious 
breath he whispered to those who stooped over him, 
"The Bill! Take care of the Bill! Take care of the 
Bill!" Charles Sumner died with the "Civil Rights 
Bill" on his heart and uppermost in his mind. He 
feared not hell and he longed not for heaven ; he was 
not thinking of devil or of God; he was thinking 
of the high emergency that might defeat the result 
achieved with so much blood, the Civil Rights Bill 
that would complete by enactment the promise of the 
Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation 
Proclamation. It is the opportunity of the United 
States, at this time, to bring the dying messages of 
Thomas Jefferson and Charles Sumner down to date ; 
to ameliorate the hysteria of our country, to rebuke 
the insanity that, at this time, when Europe is bleed- 
ing itself white, would fall back upon the horrible 

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LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

logic of force, abandoning the splendid spiritual 
heights on which our fore-elders placed us. 

Up there with Charles Sumner and Thomas Jetfer- 
son I see Samuel G. Howe, the holy knight errant 
who broke the bars and let the imprisoned soul of 
Laura Bridgman go free, the man who came to the 
rescue of the most pitiable lunatics to be found in 
Boston, those who were not permitted to be treated 
even as wild beasts, but were chained to bedposts and 
disciplined with whips, so vacant were they supposed 
to be of soul. He picked out ten of these most des- 
perate and hopeless idiots, tapped at the door of the 
darkened souls and brought forth spirit, — no, as he 
himself said, he did not release, but created, spirit. 

Alongside of Samuel G. Howe in that Charles Sum- 
ner group is Horace Mann, the prophet of our public 
schools, he who vacated the Governor's chair in Mas- 
sachusetts, refused the position of legislator in our 
national Congress, put aside the ambitions that would 
have led him to whatever he might ask of a confiding 
public, that he might come out to Ohio and battle 
with stumps, mosquitoes and malaria while he laid 
the foundations of the noble Antioch College. This 
school appealed to him because it was to stand for 
inter-racial, inter-denominational and inter-sex educa- 
tion; the first college of our broad land to say, "No 
sex, sect or race lines shall be draw r n in this institu- 
tion. " He died in the prime of life from a raging fever 
brought on by overwork and exposure, and his brain 
was tortured in its last moments with anxieties for 
Antioch, — Antioch, a free college for the open mind. 

It is no easy task that is left us, that of trying to be 
true to our present opportunities by preserving for 

158 



AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



ourselves the free mind, securing for all the children 
of men free schooling and freedom to practice the 
open mind. When we think of this bequest, how cheap 
and low are some of the lines of the appeals to pa- 
triotism. We sing of our " rocks and rills and templed 
hills." There are plenty of "rocks and rills and 
templed hills" in far-off Africa; magnificent "rocks 
and rills and templed hills" in blood-stained Europe; 
unparalleled "rocks and rills and templed hills," if 
travelers are to be trusted, in sleepy Asia. No, we have 
but small claim to the respect of the nations and small 
inspirations of our own if we glory only in the extent 
of our prairies, our "unmeasured wealth," our forests 
and other "unexhausted resources." The lessons of 
history clearly show that one may be robbed of these 
bounties of nature, but they also show that we may 
encounter defeat and still endure in the hearts of the 
noble and in the lives of the striving. 

The living treasures that belong to our country are 
the treasures of mind, not alone such as are indicated 
in the individual cases of which I delight in calling 
the roll, but those of the corporate mind, the spiritual 
entity we call the United States; it is never a thing 
of statistics, never a thing of violence, and it is incon- 
ceivable that we should mishandle the spiritual 
United States in order to promote its material empire. 
Is it conceivable that we should disgrace and dishonor 
our fore-elders by seeking permanence and power on 
lines which they condemned and worked so hard to 
avoid? Can we "save" Providence, that city founded 
by the brave Roger Williams, the first to guarantee 
religious freedom to its citizens, by fortifying it or 
digging a trench around it with all the modern 

159 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

barbed-wire entanglements? On the other hand, is 
there any power of invasion on the globe, — Kaiser, 
Czar or King, — that can strike the city of Providence 
out of history and blur the fame of Roger Williams 
or weaken the potency of his message? This, too, is 
unthinkable. 

It is for us of the United States, then, to justify 
our common inheritance, to vindicate our ancestors, 
to restore confidence in their ideas and ideals, to throw 
back in the face of faithless interpreters the great 
slander that human agreements, even between nations, 
are but" scraps of paper " unless backed by claws 
and horns raised to their human efficiency. I deny 
the slander. "Scraps of paper " represent the business 
of the world today. Not a house in Chicago could 
do business for a week if you broke down its faith in 
"scraps of paper. " Millions of homes in this Western 
Continent are rendered sacred and more enduring for 
marriage vows spoken at the altar. " Scraps of paper, " 
even in the most questionable form, have held and 
still hold nations in bonds of good-will and co-opera- 
tion. Novicow, the learned student of history, whose 
little book is one of the classics on this subject, 
estimates that during the years from 1300 B. C. to 
1868 A. D., — hold the dates for a moment in your 
minds, — eight thousand treaties between nations were 
sealed, and that these treaties held for an average of 
two years each. Study frail human nature on any 
side and you will find in its record cause for 
encouragement. Of course treaties have been broken, 
of course promissory notes have been defaulted, and 
of course men have proved unreliable in business and 
companies have gone down discreditably; but these 

160 



AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



facts are noticeable because they are exceptions to 
the rule. 

It is for the United States to recommit its life and 
interests to the arbitrament of reason, the multipli- 
cation of treaties, of which several score have been 
signed and sealed under the present administration, 
and most of them will hold. But if some of them are 
broken, the remedy lies, not in the slaughter of the 
innocents, but in the consensus of the competent find- 
ing new ways of vindicating law as it is vindicated 
on the streets of Chicago through the help of 
its police force. It is for the United States to draw 
the broad distinction between an "army" and a 
"police force." We need a police force to protect the 
well-being of our citizens, to save life, to be equal to 
emergencies that may arise. We exercise such a force 
in the home, we are developing it in the city, we need 
an army and navy to preserve and enforce law within, 
but no more armies to hold down the nations to the 
old ethics of the duel. We should endeavor to lift the 
nations into an international compact where the good- 
will of all will compel confidence and obedience in 
each. 

Recent events prove what I say. An acknowl- 
edged bandit, a proclaimed outlaw, whose authority 
our government has persistently refused to recognize, 
with a few maddened desperadoes, certainly not more 
than a few hundred, recklessly "shot up" — that is 
what they call it out West — a little village of the 
plains on the Mexican border line, killing sixteen 
Americans. If the newspapers are to be trusted, one 
hundred of the outlaws paid the bitter penalty with 
their lives, — one hundred and sixteen dead away out 

161 



LOVE FOB THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

there on the plains where recklessness has always 
obtained, and lo! throughout the length and breadth 
of the land comes the call to arms, a demand that an 
army thousands strong shall invade a foreign country 
in order to capture the outlaw leader. Anyone who 
knows anything about warfare knows that, from a 
tactical standpoint, such a quest would be as if you 
went out hunting wolves with howitzers, shooting rab- 
bits with ten-pounders, stalking partridges with auto- 
mobiles. The sad part of this hopeless hunt is that 
many good men will be slaughtered and many legit- 
imate interests will be broken up. 

The papers tell us that 5,550 Illinois militiamen 
are ready to go to "hunt down" this one bandit and 
his handful of associates, and that these 5,550 soldiers, 
enlisted men, are officered by 552 officers, — one officer 
for every ten men. We, w r ho know from experience 
what warfare is, realize that it might be more efficient 
and save a lot of money if the 552 officers were sent 
down there and the men allowed to stay home to put 
in the crops this spring. I submit this plan as good 
tactics, as it certainly is good economy. By some 
such sharp thrusts of common sense is the United 
States to become equal to its present opportunity. 
Thus it will prove its faith in its fathers and perpet- 
uate the domination of law and of reason as laid down 
by Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Sum- 
ner, Samuel G. Howe, Thomas Higginson and all 
the blessed women and a lot more men, — Emerson, 
Lowell, Whitman, and the rest of them representing 
the solid United States that now confronts the world 
and challenges the admiration of humanity. 

Let me bear the testimony of a recent traveler and 

162 



AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



fling back the untruthful insinuation that the United 
States has no friends over in Europe now; that 
nobody likes the United States. This may be true 
of the militant leaders of the belligerent countries; 
but, believe me, the heart of Europe is tender toward 
the United States. The hopes of Europe, individually 
and politically, are centered in the United States, and 
its own faith in the future is obscured only when it 
looks in vain for the divine leadership of the United 
States. 

The last book to reach my study table came last 
night. It is called "The Confession of a Hyphen- 
ated-American," and it is written by our friend, 
Edward Steiner of Iowa. He says : 

I refuse to be patriotic in the European sense, which 
means to believe everything bad about other nations and 
nothing but good about your own, and to hate with des- 
perate hatred the people living yonder, where they have 
painted another color on the custom house barrier. 

If to be an American, a real American, and a patriot, is 
merely that same thing, then frankly I am neither an Amer- 
ican nor a patriot; for, in America, I have been emanci- 
pated from the patriotism of hate. 

Heaven help us to seek that emancipation! Again 
he says : 

Even as dogs are trained to guard sheep, and to give 
their lives for them, begin to eat them as soon as they smell 
their blood, so we feel the passion of primitive man; the 
moldy odor of the cave is upon us, and we have fallen back 
several thousand years. 

I am not afraid of war, not afraid that house and home, 
reared in the joy of love and labor, may be destroyed. I 
am not afraid of dying. I should rather be riddled by bul- 

163 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

lets than eaten by cancer. I should sooner perish by a sub- 
marine than from Bright's disease. 

I do fear, frankly fear, killing and destroying. Most 
of all, I am afraid of demolishing the structure we have 
reared here; a rare commonwealth, made up of the flotsam 
and jetsam of the world, which has drifted in through the 
longer and shorter years. We are a nation, a great nation, 
a united nation, although composed of the most diverse 
materials. 

I have no objection to preparedness, but I do object to 
the attending hysteria, which may accomplish the very op- 
posite of what is desired, and weaken rather than strengthen 
the nation. Guns and battleships can be bought for money, 
but fidelity and devotion cannot be gained by breeding sus- 
picion of those who happen to have been born in another 
country. 

I plead guilty to being one of those "molly-coddles" and 
"college-sissies" held up to the ridicule of the populace. I 
do not believe in war, — not until every resource to settle 
the difficulty without it has been exhausted. 

I do not belive in war, and I am willing to go on 
record, as Mr. Steiner has, and to say so, as an 
American. Oh, we can easily pay for more guns and 
battleships, we can spare men from the constructive 
walks of life if it be necessary ; but more than these 
things I deplore the fall of our ideals, the disintegra- 
tion of our faith in principle, the brutalizing of our 
young men and the making superficial of our young 
women by leading them away from these great leaders 
of thought and culture, science and art, to engage in 
the gruesome work of arming men and trying to save 
a nation by cannon and bayonet, which never yet, since 
time began, have given permanent peace to any power 

164 



AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY 



on earth, as every long range student of history 
knows. 

"What is the subject of your address tomorrow?" 
asked the venerable ex-Prime Minister of Holland, 
in an interview which he solicited only a few 
weeks ago, when we were at the Hague. I said, "I 
call it, i Above All Nations is Humanity.' " The old 
man was silent for a space, as old brains have a right 
to be deliberate, and then this man of eighty-three 
years said with great directness, "Why do you not 
call it 'Above All Nations is God'?" I confess it 
struck me hard, but I replied, "I think I mean the 
same thing." "It may mean the same thing to you," 
said the old man, "but not quite to me." The vener- 
able Hollander probably spoke from the Calvinistic 
standpoint, certainly from a healthy Calvinistic inher- 
itance, and I took his word from the standpoint given 
me by the prophets, with whom you are acquainted. 
But the question was pertinent, whether you speak 
from the standpoint of Calvin or of Channing, from 
Bible text or the verdict of science, from Moses or 
Darwin, above all nations is God, and all nations, 
like individuals, are amendable to the God of Justice 
and Right ; nations as men are weighed in the balances 
of the Eternal, which are founded in equity, and the 
determining figures are written in the signatures of 
love and justice. 

Oh, it is the privilege of the United States, our 
beloved United States, to become, as Whitman called 
it, "A nation of nations"; to rejoice in the polyglot 
quality of its citizenship, to cherish its inheritance 
of variety, to commit the lesson which I recently gave 
to our Sunday-school teachers, the message coming 

165 



LOVE FOR THE BATTLE-TORN PEOPLES 

down a thousand years from the first great King of 
Hungary, when he said that the people of one lan- 
guage and one descent are necessarily weak ; that mul- 
tiplicity of language and variety of descent are neces- 
sary in order to make men strong. If King Stephen 
of Hungary had reason to trust this logic in the tenth 
century, how much more profound are its readings in 
the United States in this, the twentieth century of 
the Christian era. 

"Rally 'round the flag, boys, rally once again, 
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom. ,, 

We sang this song in '61 to '65, and we will sing 
it again, but the flag we will now rally around is not 
a flag that can be torn by powder and ball, but the 
banner of free thought,, of hospitality, of reason, of 
courts and laws. And, if need be, in the brave lan- 
guage of Bishop Grier of New York City, I am pre- 
pared to say that the cause which might call me 
to give my life to its establishment may yet call for 
a nation to ascend its Calvary, for nations, as indi- 
viduals, may ascend the Mount of Triumph and con- 
quer on the Cross, like the Nazarene. 



166 



OTHER BOOKS 

BY 

JENKIN LLOYD JONES 



BOOKS 

Jess: Bits of Wayside Gospel. Cloth $1.50 

A Search for an Infidel: Bits of Wayside Gospel (Second Series). 

Cloth 1.50 The two volumes 2.50 

Love and Loyalty. Sermons preached to the Confirmation Classes 

of Abraham Lincoln Centre. Cloth, net 1.50 

What Does Christmas Really Mean? By John T. McCutcheon 
and Jenkin Lloyd Jones. With colored cartoon cover and 
frontispiece by Mr. McCutcheon. Boards, net, 50 cents; post- 
paid 45 

Nuggets from a Welsh Mine. Cloth, net 1.00 

A Chorus of Faith, as heard in the Parliament of Religions. A 
book of selections giving points of harmony between the rep- 
resentatives of the various religions. Edited by Jenkin Lloyd 
Jones. Cloth 1.00 

Seven Great Religious Teachers: I, Moses; II, Zoroaster; III, 
Confucius; IV, Buddha; V, Socrates; VI, Jesus; VII, Moham- 
med. The seven pamphlets in a neat case, net 75 

The Faith That Makes Faithful. By W. C. Gannett and Jenkin 

Lloyd Jones. Silk cloth, net 75 

Paper 25 

On the Firing Line in the Battle for Sobriety. Boards 50 



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700 Oakwood Boulevard 
CHICAGO 



PAMPHLETS 

History and Practice of Religion. Seven-year course outline. 16- 
page pamphlet 15 

Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament. Edited by mem- 
bers of Mr. Jones' class. In sheets, suitable for "tipping" 
into Bibles 25 

Reinforcements of Faith: A Dedication Trilogy. Net 25 

Practical Piety. Paper, 10c. Cloth, net 30 

Ten Noble Poems. Paper, net 25 

Advice to Girls. From John Ruskin, with Lenten Sermon by Jen- 
kin Lloyd Jones. Paper, net 35 

The Dying Message of Paracelsus. With an introduction by 

Jenkin Lloyd Jones. In decorated envelope. Paper, net 50 

Conscience Calls: Five sermons. The Call of the City, Church, 

Home, Individual, State. Paper, net 25 

The Selfishness of Grief 10 

Death as a Friend 10 

The Divinity of Fatherhood 10 

The Dual Mystery: What is Materialism? 10 

Great Hopes for Great Souls 10 

The Intellectual Life 10 

What Shall I Do to Be Saved 10 

The Carpenter's Son the Leader of Men 10 

A Plea for Peace Among the Nations 10 

Sunday Talks About Sunday 10 

Applied Religion. I, A New Help for the Drunkard; II, Tobacco, 
the Second Intoxicant; III, No Sex in Crime; IV, Not Insti- 
tutions, but Homes. Each 10 

The Monroe Doctrine Enlarged 05 

The Cause of the Toiler 05 

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UNITY. A weekly journal of unsectarian religion, for Interna- 
tional Unity, Good Citizenship, Good Literature and Freedom, 
Fellowship and Character in Religion. Established 1878. $2.00 
per annum. (Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Editor.) 



PUBLIC LECTURES 

So far as other engagements permit, Mr. Jones is open for engage- 
ments to lecture on the following subjects: 

I. Peace Lectures. 

1. "Cease Firing!" 

2. Armaments as Irritants. 

3. Peace, Not War, the School of Heroism. 

4. The Burden of Woman; the Supreme Task of Woman. 

5. The Golden Rule Between Nations and Races. 

6. The Story of the Ford Peace Ship and Its Lessons. 

II. Prophets of Modern Literature. 

III. Art in the Poetry of Robert Browning. 

IV. Masterpieces of George Eliot. 
V. Social Studies of Henrik Ibsen. 

VI. Educational Heroes. 

VII. Martyrs and Prophets of the Open Faith. 

VIII. Studies in Fiction. 

IX. Humane Society Lectures. 

X. Interpretative Readings in Poetry. 

XI. For Lyceum and Chautauqua Platforms. 

XII. Biographical Lectures. 

XIII. Abraham Lincoln. 

XIV. The Beatific Life. 
XV. Heralds of Progress. 

XVI. The Eternally Womanly. 

XVII. "Believing Heretics." 

A complete list of individual lectures under these groupings will 
be furnished on request. 



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